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TO THE READER OF THIS 
VOLUME 

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ROAMING THROUGH 
THE WEST INDIES 



BY 



HARRY A. FRANCK 

Author of "A Vagabond Journey Around the World," 

"Zone Policeman 88," "Vagabonding 

Down the Andes," etc., etc. 



ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS 
BY THE AUTHOR 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1920 



Copyright, 1920, by 
The Centuby Co. 



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OCT -5 1920 



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©CI.A597652 






TO 

MY WIFE, RACHEL, 

WITH WHOM THIS WAS THE BEGINNING 

OF A FAR LONGER JOURNEY, AND 

TO 

MY SON, HARRY, 

WHO JOINED US ON THE WAY 



FOREWARNING 

Some years ago I made a tramping trip around the world for my own 
pleasure. Friends coaxed me to set it down on paper and new friends 
were kind enough to read it. Since then they have demanded more — 
at least so the publishers say — but always specifying that it shall be on 
foot. Now, I refuse to be dictated to as to how I shall travel ; I will 
not be bullied into tramping when I wish to ride. The journey here- 
with set forth is, therefore, among other things, a physical protest 
against that attempted coercion, a proof that I do not need to walk 
unless I choose to do so. To make broken resolutions impossible, I 
picked out a trip that could not be done on foot. It would be difficult 
indeed to walk through the West Indies. Then, to make doubly sure, 
I took with me a newly acquired wife — and we brought back a newly 
acquired son, though that has nothing to do with the present story. 

I will not go so far as to say that I abjured footing it entirely. As a 
further proof of personal liberty I walked when and where the spirit 
moved me — and the element underfoot was willing. But I wish it 
distinctly understood from the outset that this is no " walking trip." 
Once having broken the friends who flatter me with their attention of 
expecting me to confine myself to the prehistoric form of locomotion — 
I shall probably take to the road again to relieve a chronic foot-itch. 

The following pages do not pretend to " cover " the West Indies. 
They are made up of the random pickings of an eight-months' tour of 
the Antilles, during which every island of importance was visited, but 
they are put together rather for the entertainment of the armchair 
traveler than for the information of the traveler in the flesh. While the 
latter may find in them some points to jot down in his itinerary, he 
should depend rather on the several thorough and orderly books that 
have been written for his special benefit. 

Harry A. Franck. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Overland to the West Indies 3 

THE AMERICAN WEST INDIES 
II Random Sketches of Havana 25 

III Cuba from West to East 50 

IV The World's Sugar-Bowl .76 

V Under the Palm-Tree of Haiti 106 

VI The Death of Charlemagne ' 128 

VII Hither and Yon in the Haitian Bush 149 

VIII The Land of Bullet-Holes 189 

IX Travels in the Cibao 207 

X Santo Domingo Under American Rule 229 

XI Our Porto Rico 256 

XII Wandering About Borinquen * 280 

XIII In and About Our Virgin Islands 304 

THE BRITISH WEST INDIES 

XIV The Caribbee Islands 339 

XV " Little England " 360 

XVI Trinidad, the Land of Asphalt ..■'... 381 

XVII African Jamaica 403 

THE FRENCH WEST INDIES AND THE OTHERS 
A 
' XVIII Guadeloupe and Dependencies 439 

XIX Rambles in Martinique 449 

XX Odds and Ends in the Caribbean 475 

ix 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Shade-grown tobacco in Porto Rico Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

St. Augustine, Florida, from the old Spanish fortress 16 

A policeman of Havana . . 16 

Cuba's new presidential palace 17 

Venders of lottery tickets in rural Cuba 32 

The winning numbers of the lottery 32 

Pigeons are kept to clear the tobacco fields of insects 33 

Ploughing for tobacco in the famous Vuelta Abajo district. The large 
building is a tobacco barn, the small ones are residences of the 

planters 33 

A Cuban shoemaker 56 

Cuban soldiers 56 

Matanzas, with drying sisal fiber in the foreground 57 

The Central Plaza of Cienfuegos 57 

A principal street of Santa Clara 64 

The Central Plaza of Santa Clara 64 

A dairyman, Santa Clara district t ........ 65 

Cuban town scenery 65 

A Cuban residence in a new clearing ., ,. . . . .80 

Planting sugar-cane on newly cleared land 80 

Hauling cane to a Cuban sugar-mill ...... 81 

A station of a Cuban pack train 81 

Cuban travelers t .... 96 

A Cuban milkman 96 

A street of Santiago de Cuba . . . ... . . .... . .97 

Not all Chinamen succeed in Cuba 97 

The entire enlisted personnel of the Haitian Navy 112 

A school in Port au Prince 112 

The central square and Cathedral of Port au Prince on market day . 113 
Looking down upon the market from the cathedral platform . . .113 
A Haitian gendarme 128 

The president of Haiti. ...,...,.. 128 

xi 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

A street in Port au Prince 129 

The unfinished presidential palace of Haiti, on New Year's Day, 1920 . 129 

A Haitian country home 144 

A small portion of one collection of captured caco war material . . 144 

The caco in the foreground killed an American Marine . ... 145 

Captain Hanneken and " General Jean " Conze at Christophe's Citadel 145 

Ruins of the old French estates are to be found all over Haiti . . 160 

A Haitian wayside store 160 

The market women of Haiti sell everything under the sun — A " Gen- 
eral " in a Haitian market 161 

There are still more primitive sugar-mills than these in Haiti . . . 161 

A corner of Christophe's Citadel. Its situation is such that it could 

only be well photographed from an airplane 176 

The ruins of Christophe's palace of San Souci 176 

The mayor, the judge, and the richest man of a Haitian town in the 

bush 177 

Cockfighting is a favorite Haitian sport 177 

The plaza and clock tower of Monte Cristo, showing its American 

bullet hole , 192 

Railroading in Santo Domingo 192 

The tri-weekly train arrives at Santiago 193 

Dominican guardias 193 

Gen. Deciderio Arias, now a cigar maker, whose revolution finally 

caused American intervention in Santo Domingo 208 

A bread seller of Santo Domingo 208 

The church within a church of Moca 209 

The " holy place " of Santo Domingo on top of the Santo Cerro where 

Columbus planted a cross , . ,., 209 

A Dominican switch engine 224 

A Dominican hearse . ' . . , ... . .■ . . . 224 

American Marines on the march 225 

A riding horse of Samana 225 

Advertising a typical Dominican theatrical performance 240 

A tree to which Columbus tied one of his ships, now on the wharf of 

Santo Domingo City 240 

The tomb of Columbus in the cathedral of Santo Domingo City . . 241 

Ponce de Leon's palace now flies the Stars and Stripes 256 

Thousands of women work in the fields in Porto Rico 256 

Air plants grow even on the telegraph wires in Ponce 257 

A hat seller of Cabo Rojo 257 



ILLUSTRATIONS xiii 

FACING PAGE 

There is school accommodation for only half the children of our Porto 

Rico 272 

The home of a lacemaker in Aguadilla 273 

The Porto Rican method of making lace 273 

The place of pilgrimage for pious Porto Ricans ......... 288 

Porto Rican children of the coast lands 288 

The old sugar-kettles scattered through the West Indies have many uses 289 

A corner in Aguadilla 289 

The priest in charge of Porto Rico's place of pilgrimage .... 296 

One reason why cane-cutters cannot all be paid the same wages . . 296 

A procession of strikers in honor of representatives of the A. F. of L. 297 

' "How many of you are on strike?" asked Senator Iglesias . . . 297 

The new church of Guayama, Porto Rico 304 

A Porto Rican ex-soldier working as road peon. He gathers the grass 

with a wooden hook and cuts it with a small sickle 304 

Porto Rican tobacco fields 305 

Charlotte Amalie, capital of our Virgin Islands 305 

A corner of Charlotte Amalie 320 

Picking sea-island cotton, the second of St. Croix products .... 320 
A familiar sight in St. Croix, the ruins of an old sugar mill and the 

stone tower of its cane-grinding windmill 321 

A cistern in which rain water is stored for drinking purposes . . . 321 
Roseau, capital of beautiful Dominica 352 

A woman of Dominica bringing a load of limes down from the moun- 
tain 352 

Kingstown, capital of St. Vincent 353 

Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbados, with its statue of Nelson . 353 

The Prince of Wales lands in Barbados 368 

The principal street of Bridgetown, decorated in honor of its royal 

visitor .1 .... 368 

Barbadian porters loading hogsheads of sugar always take turns riding 

back to the warehouse 369 

There is an Anglican Church of this style in each of the eleven par- 
ishes of Barbados , 369 

The turn-out of most Barbadians 384 

A Barbadian windmill • . ... 385 

Two Hindus of Trinidad 385 

Trinidad has many Hindu temples ..... .1 400 

Very much of a lodge 400 

At the "Asphalt Lake" 401 



xiv ILLUSTRATIONS 

PACING PAGE 

There is water, too, in the crevices of the asphalt field 401 

As I passed this group on a Jamaican highway, the woman reading the 

Bible was saying " So I ax de Lard what I shall do " . . . . 416 

" Draw me portrait please, sir ! " The load consists of school books 

and a pair of hobnail shoes 416 

A very frequent sight along the roads of Jamaica 417 

Our baggage following us ashore in one of the French islands . . 417 

-L Private graveyards are to be found all over Jamaica 432 

A street of Basse Terre, capital of Guadeloupe 432 

A woman of Guadeloupe 433 

The town criers of Pointe a Pitre 433 

In the outskirts of Guadeloupe's commercial capital 448 

Fort de France, capital of Martinique 448 

The savane of Fort de France, with the Statue of Josephine, once 

Empress of the French 449 

Women of Martinique 464 

A principal street of Fort de France with its cathedral 464 

The shops of Martinique are sometimes as gaily garbed as the women 465 

Empress Josephine was born where this house stands 465 

The St. Pierre of to-day with Pelee in the background 472 

The cathedral of St. Pierre 473 

The present residents of St. Pierre tuck their houses into the corners 

of old stone ruins 473 

The harbor of Curaqao 480 

A woman of Curaqao 480 

The principal Dutch island is not noted for its verdure 481 

A Curaqao landscape 481 

MAP 
The itinerary of the author 48 



ROAMING THROUGH THE 
WEST INDIES 



ROAMING THROUGH THE 
WEST INDIES 

CHAPTER I 

OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 

WE concluded that if we were to spend half a year or more 
rambling through the West Indies we would get sea-water 
enough without taking to the ships before it was necessary. 
Our first dream was to wander southward in the sturdy, if middle- 
aged, gasolene wagon we must otherwise leave behind, abandoning it for 
what it would bring when the mountains of central Cuba grew too diffi- 
cult for its waning vigor. But the tales men told of southern highways 
dampened our ardor for that particular species of adventure. They 
were probably exaggerated tales. Looking back upon the route from 
the eminence of automobile-infested Havana, we are of the impression 
that such a trip would have been marred only by some rather serious 
jolting in certain parts of the Carolinas and southern Georgia, and a 
moderately expensive freight-bill from the point where lower Florida 
turns to swamps and islands. If our people of the South carry out the 
ambitious highway plans that are now being widely agitated, there is no 
reason that the West Indian traveler of a year or two hence should 
hesitate to set forth in his own car. 

The rail-routes from the northeastern states are three in number, 
converging into one at something over five hundred miles from the end 
of train travel. Those to whom haste is necessary or more agreeable 
than leisure may cover the distance from our greatest to our southern- 
most city in forty-eight hours, and be set down in Havana the following 
dawn. But with a few days to spare the broken journey is well worth 
the enhanced price and trouble. A truer perspective is gained by 
following the gradual change that increasing length of summer gives 
the human race rather than by springing at once from the turmoil of 
New York to the regions where winter is only a rumor and a hear-say. 

In the early days of October the land journey southward is like the 
running backward of a film depicting nature's processes. The rich 

3 



4 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

autumn colors and the light overcoats of Pennsylvania advance gradu- 
ally to the browning foliage and the wrapless comfort of the first 
autumn breezes, then within a few hours to the verdant green and 
simpler garb of full summer. There are reservations, however, in the 
change of human dress, which does not keep pace with that of the 
landscape. Our Southerners seem to be ruled in sartorial matters 
rather by the dictators of New York fashions than by the more fitting 
criterion of nature, and the glistening new felt fedora persists far 
beyond the point where the lighter covering would seem more suitable 
to time and place. 

To the Northerner the first item of interest is apt to be the sudden 
segregation of races in the trains leaving Washington for the South. 
From the moment he surreptitiously sheds his vest as he rumbles 
across the Potomac the traveler finds his intercourse with his African 
fellow-citizens, be they jet black or pale yellow, circumscribed by an 
impregnable wall that is to persist until all but a narrow strip of .his 
native land has shrunk away behind him. Only as superior to inferior, 
as master to servant, or as a curiosity akin to that of the supercilious 
voyager toward the " natives " of some foreign land, is his contact 
henceforth with the other race. Stern placards point out the division 
that must be maintained in public buildings or conveyances ; custom 
serves as effectually in private establishments ; the very city directories 
fetch up their rear with the " Colored Department." 

The tourist's first impression of Richmond will largely depend on 
whether his train sets him down at the disreputable Main Street station 
or at the splendid new Union Depot on the heights of Broad Street. 
Unfortunately, the latter is as yet no more nearly " union " than it is, 
in spite of a persistent American misnomer, a " depot," and his 
chances of escaping the medieval landing-place are barely more than 
" fifty-fifty." But his second notion of the erstwhile capital of the 
Confederacy cannot but be favorable, unless his tastes run more to the 
picturesque than to modern American civilization. He may at this 
particular season grumble at a sweltering tropical heat that appears 
long before he bargained for it, but the hospitable Richmonder quickly 
appeases his wrath in this regard by explaining that some malignant 
cause, ranging from the disturbance of the earth's orbit by the war 
just ended to a boiling Gulf Stream, has given the South the hottest 
autumn in — I hesitate to say how many decades. Nor, if he is new 
to the life below Mason and Dixon's Line, will he escape a certain 
surprise at finding how green is still the memory of the Confederacy. 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 5 

The Southerner may have forgiven, but he has not forgotten, nor 
does he intend that his grandchildren shall do so. 

In that endless stretch of sand, cotton, and pine-trees which is 
locally known as " Nawth Cahlina, sah," there are other ways of pass- 
ing the time than by watching the endless unrolling of a sometimes 
monotonous landscape. One can get into conversation, for instance, 
with the train-crew far more easily than in the more frigid North, and 
listen for hours to more or less verdant anecdotes, which the inimitable 
Southern dialect alone makes worth the hearing. Or, if wise enough to 
abandon the characterless cosmopolitan Pullman for the local atmos- 
phere of the day coach, one may catch such scraps as these — of special 
interest to big-game hunters — from the lips of fellow-passengers : 

" Say, d' you hear about Bud Hampton ? " 

" What Bud done now? " 

" Why, las' week Bud Hampton shot a buck niggah 't weighed ovah 
two hunderd pound! " 

This particular species of quarry seemed to grow blacker with each 
succeeding state. The two urchins in one-piece garments who lugged 
our hand-bags up the slope in Columbia made coal seem of a pale 
tint by comparison. At the corner of a main street so business-bent 
as to require the constant attention of a traffic policeman they steered us 
toward the door of a somewhat weather-worn establishment. 

"This the best hotel?" I queried, a bit suspicious that the weight 
of their burdens had warped their judgment. " How about that one 
down the street?" It was a building of very modern aspect, looming 
ten full stories into the brilliant Southern heavens. 

"Dat ain' no hotel, sah," cried the two in one breath, rolling their 
snow-white eyeballs, their black toes seeming to wriggle with pride at 
the magnificence it presented, " dat 's de sky-scrapah! " 

It was in Columbia that we felt for the first time irrevocably in 
the South. Richmond had been merely an American city with a 
Southern atmosphere ; South Carolina's capital was the South itself, 
despite its considerable veneer of modern Americanism. One must 
look at three faces to find one indubitably white. Clusters of ma- 
hogany-red sugar-canes lolled in shady corners, enticing the black 
brethren to exercise their powerful white teeth. Goats drowsed in 
patches of sand protected from the insistent sunshine. Motormen 
raised their caps with one hand and brought their dashing conveyances 
to a sudden halt with the other at the very feet of their " lady acquaint- 
ances," whose male escorts returned the greeting with equal solemnity. 



6 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

I puzzled for some time to know what far-distant city this one, with 
its red soil stretching away to suburban nothingness from the points 
where the street paving petered out, with its goats and sugar-cane, its 
variegated complexions, and frank contentment with life, was insistently 
recalling to memory. Then all at once it came to me. Purged of its 
considerable American bustle, Columbia would bear a striking resem- 
blance to Asuncion, capital of far-off Paraguay. Even the wide-open 
airiness of its legislative halls, drowsing in the excusable inoccupancy 
of what was still mid-summer despite the calendar, carried the imagina- 
tion back to the land of the Guarani. 

An un-Northern spaciousness was characteristic of the chief hostelry, 
with its ample chambers, its broad lounging-room, its generously 
gaping spitoons, offering not too exacting a target to the inattentive 
fire of Southern marksmanship. The easy-going temperament of its 
management came as a relief from the unflinching rule-of-thumb back 
over the horizon behind us. The reign of the old-fashioned " American 
plan," synonymous with eating when and what the kitchen dictates 
rather than leaving the guest a few shreds of initiative, had begun 
again and was to persist for a thousand miles southward. But can 
some trustworthy authority tell us what enactment requires that the 
" choicest room " of the " best hotel" of every American city be 
placed at the exact junction-point of the most successful attempt to 
concentrate all its twenty-four hours of uproar? I ask not in wrath, 
for time and better slumber have assuaged that, but out of mere 
academic curiosity. In the good, old irresponsible days of my " hobo " 
youth the " jungle " beyond the railroad yards was far preferable to this 
aristocratic Bedlam. 

The "sky-scrapah " loomed behind us for half an hour or more 
across the mighty expanse of rolling sand-and-pine-tree world, with 
its distance-purple tinge and its suggestion of the interior of Brazil, 
which fled northward on the next lap of our journey. The cotton- 
fields which interspersed the wilderness might have seemed patches of 
daisies to the casual glance, rather sparse and thirsty daisies, for this 
year the great Southern crop had sadly disappointed its sponsors. 
Powder-dry country roads of reddish sand straggled along through 
the endless stretches of scrub-pines, carrying here and there the sagging 
buggy and gaunt and dust-streaked horse of former days. I relegate 
the equine means of transportation to the past advisedly, for his 
doom was apparent even in these sparsely cultivated and thinly peopled 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 7 

regions. Before a little unpainted, wooden negro church that drifted 
by us there clustered twenty-eight automobiles, with a bare half-dozen 
steeds drooping limply on their weary legs in the patches of shade the 
machines afforded them. King Cotton, abetted by his royal contempo- 
raries overseas, has drawn no color-line in deluging his favors on 
his faithful subjects. Forests of more genuine trees replaced the scrub 
growth for long spaces farther on ; here and there compact rectangles 
of superlatively green sugar-cane contrasted with the dead-brown 
patches of shriveled corn. In the smoking compartment of the coach 
placarded " White " shirt-sleeves and open collars were the rule, but 
the corresponding section of the " Colored " car indulged in no such 
disheveled comfort. The negroes of the South seem more consistent 
followers of Beau Brummel than their white neighbors. 

We descended at Savannah in a hopeful frame of mind, for a recent 
report announced it the most nearly reasonable in its food prices of the 
fifty principal cities of our United States. Georgia's advantage in the 
contest with starvation was soon apparent. At the desk of the hotel 
overlooking a semi-tropical plaza the startled newcomer found staring 
him in the face a dire threat of incarceration, in company with the 
recipient, if he so far forgot himself as to offer a gratuity. There was 
something strangely familiar, however, about the manner of the grand- 
son of Africa who hovered about the room to which he had conducted 
us, flecking away a speck of dust here, raising a curtain and lowering 
it again to the self-same height over yonder. I had no desire to spend 
even a short span of my existence in a Southern dungeon, along with 
this dusky bearer of the white man's burdens. But he would have 
made a most unsuitable spectator to the imperative task of removing 
the Georgian grime of travel. Enticing him into a corner out of sight 
of the key-hole I called his attention to the brilliancy of a silver coin. 
Instead of springing to a window to shout for the police, he snatched 
the curiosity in a strangely orthodox manner, flashed upon us a row 
of dazzlingly white teeth, and wished us a pleasant evening. Possibly 
I had read the anti-tipping ordinance too hastily; it may merely have 
forbidden the public bestowal of gratuities. 

A microscopic examination might possibly have proved that the 
reckoning which was laid before us at the end of dinner showed 
some signs of shrinkage ; to the naked eye it was quite as robust as 
its twin brothers to the North. But of course the impossibility of 
leaving a goodly proportion of the change to be cleared away with 
the crumbs would account for Savannah's low cost of living. The 



8 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

lengthening of the ebony face at my elbow as I scraped the remnants 
of my bank-note together might have been due to the exertions of the 
patent-leather shoes that sustained it to contain more than their fair 
share of contents. - But it seemed best to make sure of the source of 
dismay ; we might have to eat again before we left Savannah. 

" I understand you can't accept tips down here in Georgia ? " I 
hazarded, reversing the usual process between money and pocket. The 
increasing elongation of the waiter's expression branded the notion a 
calumny even sooner than did his anxious reply : 

"Ah been taking 'em right along, sah. Yes, sah, thank you, sah. 
Dey did try to stop us makin' a livin', sah, but none of de gen'lemans 
do'n ferget us." 

I can highly commend the anti-tipping law of Georgia ; it gives one 
a doubled sense of adventure, of American freedom from restraint, 
reminiscent of the super-sweetness of stolen apples in our boyhood days. 

We liked Savannah ; preferred it, perhaps, to any of the cities of our 
journey southward. We liked the Southern hospitality of its churches, 
consistent with their roominess and their wide-open windows. We 
were particularly taken with the custom of furnishing fans as well as 
hymn-books, though we may have wondered a bit whether the segrega- 
tion of the colored people persisted clear beyond St. Peter's gate. 
We were especially grateful to the genius of Oglethorpe, who had made 
this a city of un-American spaciousness, with every other cross street 
an ample boulevard, which gave the lungs and the eyes a sense of 
having escaped to the open country. Perhaps it was these wooded 
avenues, more than anything else, that made us feel we were at last 
approaching the tropics, where life itself is of more real importance than 
mere labor and business. Had we settled there, we should quickly 
have attuned ourselves to the domesticity of her business customs, — 
breakfast at nine, dinner from two to four, giving the mind harrassed 
with the selling of cotton or the plaints of clients time to compose 
itself in household quiet, supper when the evening breezes have wiped 
out the memory of the scorching sun. We liked the atmosphere of 
genuine companionship between the two sections of the population, 
despite the line that was sternly drawn between them where social 
intercourse might otherwise have blended together. The stately tread 
of the buxom negro women bearing their burdens on heads that seemed 
designed for no other purpose fitted into the picture our imaginations 
persisted in painting against the background of the old slave-market, 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 9 

with its barred cells, in defiance of the assertion of inhabitants that not a 
black man had ever been offered for sale there. 

The man who conducted us to the top of Savannah's " sky-scrapah " 
— for every Southern city we visited boasted one such link between 
earth and heaven — was still frankly of the " rebel " turn of mind for 
all his youthfulness. He deplored the abolition of slavery. In the 
good old days a " niggah " was as valuable as a mule to-day ; no owner, 
unless he was a fool, would have thought of abusing so costly a posses- 
sion any more than he would now his automobile. The golden age of 
the negro was that in which he was inspected daily, as soldiers are, 
and sternly held to a certain standard of outward appearance and 
health. To-day not one out of ten of them was fit to come near a 
white man. Laziness had ruined them ; their native indolence and the 
familiarity toward them of white men from the North had been their 
downfall. The South had no fear of race riots, however; those were 
things only of the North, thanks to the Northerner's false notion of 
the " nigger's " human possibilities. Why had the black laborers who 
had raised this pride of Savannah to its lofty fifteen stories of height 
always lifted their hats to him, their foreman, and addressed the North- 
ern architects with the disrespect of covered heads? Wise men from 
" up east " soon learned the error of their ways in the treatment of the 
" niggah," after a few weeks or months of Southern residence. Slav- 
ery, in principle, was perhaps wrong, but it was the only proper system 
with negroes. Besides, we should not forget that it was not the South 
that had introduced slavery into the United States, but New England ! 
Many things, I knew, were chargeable to our northeastern states, 
but this particular accusation was new to me. Yet this son of the 
old South was a modern American in other respects, for all his out-worn 
point of view. His civic pride, bubbling over in a boasting that was 
not without a suggestion of crudity, alone proved that. Savannah was 
destined to become sooner or later the metropolis of America; it was 
already second only to New York in the tonnage of its shipping. I 
cannot recall offhand any American town that is not destined some day, 
in the opinion of its proudest citizens, to become the leader of our 
commercial life, nor one which is not already the greatest something or 
other of the entire country. No doubt this conviction everywhere 
makes for genuine progress, even though the goal of the imagination 
is but a will-o'-the-wisp. What breeds regret in my soul, however, is 
the paucity of our cities that aspire to the place of intellectual leader- 



io ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ship, as contrasted with the multitude of those which picture themselves 
the foremost in trade and commerce. 

Possibly Savannah will some day outstrip New York, but I hope not, 
for it has something to-day the loss of which would be an unfortunate 
exchange for mere metropolitan uproar and which even its own 
leisurely ambitious people might regret when it was too late. This 
view from its highest roof, with its chocolate-red river winding away 
to the sea sixteen miles distant, and inland to swampy rice-fields and the 
abodes of alligators, that can be reached only by " bateau," with its 
palm-flecked open spaces and its freedom from smoke, raised the hope 
that it might aspire to remain what it is now incontestably, a " city of 
trees " and a pleasant dwelling-place. 

There were suggestions in the over-languid manner of some of its 
poorer inhabitants that the hookworm was prevalent in Savannah. 
Well-informed citizens pooh-poohed the notion, asserting that " hook- 
worm is just a polite Northern word for laziness." The particular 
sore spot of the moment was the scarcity of sugar. From Columbia 
onward it had been served us in tiny envelopes, as in war-days. That 
displayed in store windows was a mere bait, for sale only with a corre- 
sponding quantity of groceries. All of which was especially surprising 
in a region with its own broad green patches of cane. The unsweetened 
inhabitants explained the enigma by a reference to " profiteers," and 
pointed out the glaringly new mansions of several of this inevitable 
war-time gentry. Others asserted that the ships at the wharves across 
the river were at that very moment loading hundreds of tons of sugar 
for Europe and furnishing even Germany with an article badly needed 
at home. An old darky added another detail that was not without its 
significance : 

" Dey 's plenty of sorghum an' merlasses right now, sah, but de white 
folks dey cain't eat nothin' but de pure white." 

Men of a more thoughtful class than our guide of the " sky-scrapah " 
had a somewhat different view of the glories of the old South. 

" Slavery," said one of them, '* was our curse and in time would 
have been bur ruination. Not so much because it was bad for the 
negroes, for it was n't, particularly. But it was ruining the white 
man. It made him a haughty, irresponsible loafer, incapable of con- 
trolling his temper or his passions, or of soiling his hands with labor. 
We have real cause to be grateful that slavery was abolished. But that 
does not alter the fact that right was on our side in the war with 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES n 

the North — the right of each State to dissolve its union with the 
others if it chose, which was the real question at issue, rather than the 
question of holding slaves, though I grant that we are better off by- 
sticking to the union. If the South had won, the United States would 
be to-day a quarrelsome collection of a score of independent countries, 
unprogressive as the Balkans." 

On a certain burning question even the most open-minded sons of the 
South were of the prevailing opinion. 

" Whatever the North may think," said one of this class, " we are 
forced to hold the fear of lynching constantly over the negro. In the 
North you are having far more trouble with them than we. And why? 
Because you depend on the authorities to curb them. Down here a 
serious crime by a negro is the general, immediate business of every 
man with a white skin. We cannot have our wives or daughters 
appearing on the public witness-stand to testify against an attacking 
negro. The surest, fairest, most effective, and least expensive means 
of dealing with a black scoundrel is to hang him at once from the 
nearest limb and go home and forget it. It seems to be the prevailing 
notion in the North that we are more apt than not to get the wrong 
man. That does not happen in one case out of a hundred. Our 
police and our deputy sheriffs know the whole history, the habits, 
character, and hiding-place of every nigger in their districts. When 
one of the bad ones commits a serious crime, they know exactly where 
to look for him, and the citizens who go with them take a rope along. 
Without lynching we would live in mortal terror day and night. As it 
is, we have far less trouble with the negroes than you do in the North, 
and the vast majority of them get along better with us than they do 
with you." 

Good friends squandered a considerable amount of time and gasolene 
to show us the region round about Savannah. Despite their warning 
that this floor-flat coast land was not the real Georgia, we found the 
mile after mile of cream-white roads, built of the oyster-shells that 
hang like the bluffs of mountain spurs above its coastal waters, teem- 
ing with interest to Northern eyes. The endless festoons of Spanish 
moss alone gave us the sense of having found a new corner of the 
world. Sturdy live-oaks were untroubled by these draperies of vege- 
tation, though other trees seemed gradually to waste away beneath 
them. The dead-brown fields of corn had passed the stage where they 
would have been cut and shocked in the North, and the ears hung 
limply, awaiting the hand of the picker. Corn-stalks do not tempt 



12 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

animals that can graze all through the winter. The " crackers " whose 
ramshackle abodes broke the semi-wilderness carried the memory back 
to the peasants of Venezuela or of the Brazilian hinterland; their 
speech and their mode of life were but a degree less primitive, curious 
anachronisms in the bustling, ahead-of-date America of to-day. Here 
and there we passed what had once been a great plantation of the 
South, productive now chiefly of aggressive weeds. One such busy 
estate of slavery days had been revamped and partly restored to its 
pre-war condition. By a new generation of Southern planters? No, 
indeed ! It is to-day the rendezvous of slangy, dollar-worshipping 
youths from the North, who bring with them clicking cameras and 
pampered movie stars. Thus is the aggressive modern world con- 
stantly treading on the heels of the leisurely past. 

Through the first hint of the brief southern twilight there came 
marching toward us under the festooned trees a long double-column 
of negroes, dressed in dingy cotton garments, with broad black-and- 
white stripes, clanging chains pending from their waists to their legs, 
shovels over their broad shoulders, and flanked by several weather- 
browned white men in faded khaki, carrying rifles. To our unaccus- 
tomed eyes they seemed a detail of some medieval stage-setting, long 
since abolished from the scenes of real life, at least in our western 
world. Our hosts, however, accepted the group as a consistent bit of 
the landscape, scarcely noticeable until our interest called their attention 
to it. 

" One of our far-famed Georgia chain-gangs," laughed the man at 
the wheel, " which so frequently arouse the wet-eyed pity of your 
Northern philanthropists. A little experience with the ' poor victims ' 
usually shows them that the system is not so satanic as it looks from 
the strained perspective of the North. You can take my word for it 
that at least half those niggers steal something else as soon as possible, 
once they are freed, so they can come back again to this comfortable life 
of irresponsibility and three square meals a day." 

The scarcity of towns farther south was less surprising within 
sight of the soil they must feed on than in the geographies of our 
school-days. The region reminded me of tropical Bolivia, with its 
thinly wooded pampas alternating with swamps, its reddish, undomesti- 
cated-looking cattle grazing through a wilderness scattered with palm- 
trees. Gaunt razor-backed hogs foraged savagely for nourishment 
among the forest roots about each " cracker's " weather-painted her- 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 13 

mitage. Other signs of animal life were rare, except the first buzzards 
of the tropics we were approaching, lazily circling over the tree-tops. 
The single grass-grown track sped constantly away behind us, as if 
even this way-station local saw few reasons to halt in so uncultivated a 
landscape. One of those narrow reddish rivers that seem to form 
the boundaries between all our southern states rumbled past beneath 
us, and the endless brown, swampy flat-lands of Florida, punctuated 
here and there with clusters of small wooden houses, inconspicuous 
in their drab setting as animals of protective coloring, rolled incessantly 
away into the north. 

Jacksonville, the " gateway to Florida," is not so Southern in aspect 
as Savannah. The considerable percentage of Northerners among its 
inhabitants and its bustling pursuit of material fortune give it a " busi- 
ness-first " atmosphere we had not encountered since leaving Richmond. 
Negroes, too, were scarcer in proportion to white men, and destined 
to become more so as we proceeded, a phenomenon equally noticeable 
in Brazil as the traveler approaches the equator. The reason, of course, 
is plain, and similar in the two countries. In slavery days neither our 
most southern state nor the region of the Amazon were far enough 
developed to draw many ship-loads of Africans, and their more recent 
exploitation has brought an influx of fortune-seekers, chiefly white in 
color. The creamy shell roads about " Jax," as the tendency to short 
cuts and brevity has dubbed Florida's most northern city, race 
smoothly away in all directions through endless vistas of straight yellow 
pines, interspersed with patches of lilac-hued water hyacinths, and 
strewn with spider-like undergrowth that quenches its thirst from the 
humid air. To the casual glance, at least, the sandy soil does not hold 
great promise, but it is highly productive, for all that. As proof thereof 
it is sufficient to mention that the saw-mills that furnished lath at a 
dollar a thousand a few years ago command eight times that in these 
days of universally bloated prices. 

Trainmen in light khaki garb pick up the south-bound express for 
its long run of more than five hundred miles through the peninsular 
state. A brick highway, inviting to motorists, parallels the railroad 
for a considerable distance, and surrenders its task to an efficient, if 
blacker, route farther on. There are other evidences than this that 
Florida is more conscious of her appeal to Northern excursionists than 
are several of her neighbors along the Atlantic seaboard. 

St. Augustine is perhaps more attractive, in her own way, than even 
Savannah, at least to the mere seeker after residential delights. But 



14 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

she is scarcely a part of the American South, as we of the North picture 
it. The nasal twang of our middle West, or the slurred " r " of New 
England are far more often heard on her streets and verandas than 
the leisurely drawl of what was once the Confederacy. Tasks that 
would fall only to the lot of the black man in Georgia or the Carolinas 
are here not beneath the dignity of muscular Caucasian youths. Above 
all she has a Spanish tinge that marks her as the first connecting-link 
with the vast Iberian civilization beyond. The massive fortress front- 
ing the sea, the main square that still clings to its ancient name of 
" Plaza de la Constitucion," carry the thoughts as quickly back to the 
days of buccaneers and the dark shadows of the Inquisition as those 
where the Castilian tongue holds supreme sway. Here the very stones 
of protective walls and narrow back streets are impregnated with 
rousing tales of conscienceless governors from old Spain and revolts 
of the despised criollos against the exactions of the ruling " Goths." 

But St. Augustine is, of course, genuinely American at heart for 
all its origin, and even its scattering of negroes are proudly aware of 
their nationality. 

" Look like dat some ovehseas equipment you got dah, sah," said 
the grinning, ink-complexioned youth who carried my musette to a 
chamber filled with inviting sea breezes. 

"Yes, indeed, George. Why, were you over there?" 

" Ya-as, sah. Ah sure help run dem or'nry Germans home. Dey 
hyeard a-plenty from d' shells we sent on f o' dem — from Bohdeoh." 

The memory of the war he had waged in Bordeaux caused a broad 
streak of ivory to break out across his ebony face as often as he caught 
sight of us until the " ovehseas equipment " had again disappeared in 
the direction of the station. 

Occupation, to St. Augustine, seems to be synonymous with the un- 
remitting pursuit of tourists. Her railway gates are the vortex of a 
seething whirlpool of hotel-runners and the clamoring jehus of horse 
and gasolene conveyances. An undisturbed stroll through her streets 
is out of the question, for every few yards the pedestrian is sure to 
hear the gentle rumble of wheels behind him and a sugary, " Carriage, 
sah? All de sights in town fo' two dollars, sah, or a nice ride out 

to " and so on for several minutes, until the wheedling voice has 

run through the gamut of sanguinity, persuasiveness, and shriveled 
hope, and died away in husky disappointment, only to be replaced a 
moment later by another driver's honeyed tones. 

Ponce de Leon, seeking the fountain of youth, failed to recognize 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 15 

in St. Augustine the object of his quest. Could he return to-day, he 
would find that at least the immortality of fame has been vouchsafed 
him, for his name flourishes everywhere, on hotel facades, shop fronts, 
and cigar-boxes. Perhaps, too, he was near the goal of physical per- 
manence without suspecting it. At least, if assertion be accepted as 
proof, St. Augustine is without a peer in longevity. " The oldest " is 
the title of nobility most widely prevalent in all the region. The oldest 
town, with the oldest house, flanked by the dwelling of the oldest 
woman, who attends the oldest church, linked to her residence by the 
oldest street, and visible to possessors of the oldest inducement to 
human endeavor, leaves the gaping traveler no choice but to accept the 
assertion of its inhabitants that here is to be found the oldest everything 
under the sun, or at least in the United States, which is the same 
thing, for surely no one would be so unpatriotic as to admit that other 
lands or planets could outdo us in anything we set out to accomplish. 
Even "old Ponce," dean of the six thousand saurians — count them 
if you dare to doubt — that sleep through the centuries out at St. 
Augustine's " Alligator Farm " confesses, through the mouth of his 
keeper from upstart Italy, to five hundred unbroken summers, and 
placidly accepts the honor of being " the oldest animal in captivity." 
One stands enraged at the thought that if " Ponce " cared to open 
his capacious mouth and speak, he might tell an eager* world just what 
Hernando de Soto wore when his boat glided over his everglade home, 
or what were the exact words with which his human namesake acknowl- 
edged his inability to prolong his butterfly existence by finding the 
waters of immortality. Small wonder, indeed, that he dares raise his 
scaly head and yawn in the face even of insurance agents. 

The trolley that carries " Ponce's " visitors across the wastes of 
brackish water and worthless land separating St. Augustine from the 
open sea is virtually a private car to the rare tourist of October days. 
This comatose period of the year gives the bather the sense of having 
leased the whole expanse of the Atlantic as his own bath-tub. For 
the native Floridans, however widely they may extoll their endless 
stretch of coast-line, seem to make small use of it themselves. 

For hundreds of miles southward the eyes of the traveler weary 
at the swamp and jungle sameness of the peninsular state. The Gulf 
Stream and the diligent coral have built extensively, but they have left 
the job unfinished, in the indifferent tropical way. Grape-fruit farms 
and orange-groves break forth upon the primeval wilderness here and 



16 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

there, yet only often enough to emphasize its unpeopled immensity. 
Even Palm Beach has nothing unusual to show until the holidays of mid- 
winter bring its vast hostelries back to life. One loses little in fleeing 
all day onward at Southern express speed. 

Miami, however, is worth a halt, if only for a glimpse of the United 
States in full tropical setting. There the refugee from winter will 
find cocoanuts nodding everywhere above him ; there he may pick 
his morning grape-fruit at the door ; and he need be no plutocrat to 
have his table graced with those aristocratic fruits of the tropics, the 
papaya and the alligator-pear. He cannot but be amused, too, at the 
casual Southern manners of the -street-cars, the motorman-conductors 
of which make change with one hand and govern their brakes with 
the other, or who retire to a seat within the car for a chat with a 
passenger or the retying of a shoelace, while the conveyance careens 
madly along the outskirt streets. 

Thanks, perhaps, to its sea breezes, Miami seemed no hotter than 
Richmond, though it was a humid, tropical heat that forced its in- 
habitants to compromise with Dame Fashion. As far north as Savan- 
nah a few eccentric beings ignored her dictates to the extent of fronting 
the July weather of October in white suits and straw hats, but they 
had a self-conscious, hunted manner which proved they were aware of 
their conspicuousness. In southern Florida, however, it was rather 
those who persisted in dressing by the calendar who attracted attention, 
and there were men of all occupations who dared to appear in public 
frankly devoid of the superfluous upper garment of male attire. 

Some thirty miles south of Miami the " Dixie Highway," capable and 
well-kept to the last, disappears for lack of ground to stand on. The 
soldierly yellow pines give way to scrub jungle, and swamps gain the 
ascendency over solid earth. Amphibious plants cover the landscape 
like armies of ungainly crabs or huge spiders. Compact masses of 
dwarf trees and bristling bushes cluster as tightly together as Italian 
hill-top villages, as if for mutual protection from the ever-increasing 
expanses of water. Wherever land wins the constant struggle against 
the other element, the gray " crabs " of vegetation stretch away in 
endless vistas on each hand. White herons rise from the everglades 
at the rumble of the train, and wing their leisurely way into the flat 
horizon. A constant sea breeze sweeps through the coaches. At rare 
intervals a little wooden shack or two, sometimes shaded by half a 
dozen magnificent royal palms, keeps a precarious foothold on the 




St. Augustine, Florida, from the old Spanish fortress 




A policeman of Havana 




3 

u 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 17 

shrinking soil ; but it is hard to imagine what means of livelihood man 
finds in these swampy wastes. 

The mainland ends at Jewfish, a cluster of three or four yellow 
wooden cabins, and for more than a hundred miles the traveler experi- 
ences the uncouth sensation of making an ocean voyage by rail. 
Strangely enough, however, there is more dry land for a considerable 
distance after the continent has been left behind than during the last 
twenty miles of mainland. The swamps disappear, and the gray coral 
rock of the chain of islands along which the train speeds steadily on- 
ward sustains a more generous vegetation than that of the watery wastes 
behind. Gradually, however, the grayish shallows on either hand turn 
to the ultramarine blue of the Caribbean, and the score of island step- 
ping-stones along which the railroad skips grow smaller and more 
widely separated, with long miles of sea-washed trestles between them. 
Within an hour these have become so narrow that they are invisible 
from the car windows, and the train seems to be racing along the 
surface of the sea itself, out-distancing ocean-liners bound in the same 
direction. Brazil-like villages of sun-browned shacks surrounded by 
waving cocoanut palms cluster in the center of the larger keys, as the 
Anglo-Saxon form of the Spanish cayo designates these scattered islets 
of the Caribbean. The names of the almost unpeopled stations grow 
more and more Castilian — Key Largo, Islamorada, Matacumbe, Bahia 
Honda, Boca Chica. In places the water underneath is shallow enough 
for wading, and shades away from light brown through several tones 
of pink to the deepest blue. The building of a railroad by boat must 
have been a task to try at times the stoutest hearts, and the cost thereof 
suggests that the undertaking was rather a labor of love than a hope 
of adequate financial return. 

The Cuban tinge of the passengers had steadily increased from 
Jacksonville southward ; now the " White " car showed many a com- 
plexion that was suspiciously like those in the coach ahead. As with 
the Mexican passengers of our southwest, however, the " Jim Crow " 
rules are not too rigorously applied to travelers from the lands beyond. 
Indeed, the color-line all but fades away during the long run through 
Florida, partly, perhaps, because of the increasing scarcity of negroes. 
By the time the traveler has passed Miami, African features become 
almost conspicuous by their rarity. 

Toward the end of the three-hour railway journey by sea, land grows 
so scarce that platforms are built out upon trestles to sustain the sta- 



18 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tions. The wreckage of a foundered ship lies strewn here and there 
along the edge of sandy spits across which we rumble from sea to sea. 
The pirates of olden days would scarcely believe their eyes could they 
awake and behold this modern means of trespassing on their retreats. 
Hundreds of palm-trees uprooted by the hurricane of the month before 
marked the last stages of the journey, the islands became larger and 
more closely fitted together, and as the sun was quenching his tropical 
thirst in the incredibly blue sea to the westward, the long line of a city 
appeared in the offing and the railroad confessed its inability to com- 
pete longer with its rivals in ocean transportation. 

Key West, fifteen hundred miles south of New York, is a quaint mix- 
ture of American and Latin-American civilization, with about equal 
parts of each. Its wooden houses of two or three stories, with wide 
verandas supported by pillars, lend tropical features to our familiar 
architecture. The Spanish tongue, increasingly prevalent in the streets 
from St. Augustine southward, is heard here as often as English. 
The frank staring that characterizes the Americas below the United 
States, the placid indifference to convenience typified in the failure of 
its trolley-cars to come anywhere near the railroad station, the tendency 
to consider loafing before a fruit-store or a hole-in-the-wall grocery 
a fitting occupation for grown men, mark it as deeply imbued with the 
Spanish influence. Small as the island is, the town swarms with auto- 
mobiles, and the chief ambition of its youths seems to be to drowse 
all day in the front seat of a car and trust to luck and a few passengers 
at train- or boat-time to give them a livelihood. Doctors and dentists 
announcing " special lady -attendant " show that the Latin-American 
insistence on chaperonage holds full sway. The names of candidates 
for municipal offices, from mayor to " sexton of the cemetery," are 
nearly all Spanish. As in the towns along our Mexican border, the 
official tongue is bilingual, and Americans from the North are frankly 
considered foreigners by the Cubanized rank and file of voters. 
Freight-cars marked "No sirve para azucar " ("Do not use for 
sugar") fill the railroad yards; the very motor-men greet their pas- 
sengers in Spanish. 

The resident of the " Island City " does not look forward with dread 
to his winter coal-bill. Not a house in town boasts a chimney. But 
this advantage is offset by his year-long contest with mosquitos and 
the absence of fresh water. The railroad brings long trains of the 
latter in gigantic casks; the majority of the smaller householders de- 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 19 

pend upon the rains and their eave-troughs. As in all tropical America, 
the scarcity of vegetables restricts the local diet. Fish, sponges, and 
mammoth turtles are the chief native products, with the exception, of 
course, of an industry that has carried the name of Key West to every 
village of our land. 

Of the two principal cigar factories we visited one was managed 
by a Cuban and the other by an American. The employees are some 
seventy per cent, natives of the greatest of the West Indies, and Span- 
ish is the prevailing tongue in the workshops. There, as in the city 
itself, the color-line shows no evidence of existence. Each long 
table presents the whole gamut of gradations in human complexions. 
Piece work is the all but invariable rule, and the notion of striking for 
shorter hours would find no adherents. The cigar-maker begins his 
daily task at the hour he chooses and leaves when he has wearied of 
the uninspiring toil. This does not mean that the tables are often 
unoccupied during the daylight hours, for the citizen of Key West, like 
those in every other corner of this maltreated and war-weary world, 
finds the ratio between his earnings, whatever his diligence, and the de- 
mands made upon them, constantly balancing in the wrong direction, 
despite a long series of forced wage increases within the last few years. 
Not only the pianist-fingered men who perform the most obvious opera- 
tion of cigar-making, that of rolling the weeds together in their final 
form, but those who separate the leaves into their various grades and 
colors by spreading them around the cloth-bound edge of a half-barrel, 
the women who deftly strip them of their central stem, even those 
who box and label the finished product, all have the fatness of their 
pay envelope depend on the amount they accomplish. 

Cigar-making came to Key West as the most obvious meeting-place 
of material, maker, and consumer thirty-five years ago. To-day its 
factories are almost too numerous for counting. The largest of them 
are broad, low, modern structures facing the sea and ventilated by its 
constant breezes ; the smallest are single shanty rooms. The raw ma- 
terial still comes chiefly from Cuba, but that from our own country, 
as far away as Connecticut, has its place in even the best establish- 
ments. Though women predominate in several of the processes, the 
actual making is almost entirely in the hands of men — and their 
tongues, I might add, for they do not hesitate to lend the assistance of 
those to the glue with which the consumer's end is bound together. 
The average workman rolls some two hundred cigars a day. Men, 
too, sort the damp and bloated cigars into their respective shades of 



20 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

colors and arrange them in boxes, which are placed under a press. 
From these they are removed by women and girls, a dozen labels hang- 
ing fan-wise from their lower lips, and each cigar is banded and re- 
turned to the box in the exact order in which they were taken from it. 
Stamped with the government revenue label precisely as one affixes the 
postage to a letter, the boxes are placed in an aging and drying room 
— theoretically at least, though the present insistency of demand often 
sends them on their way to the freight-cars the very day of their com- 
pletion. 

The wrapper is of course the most delicate and costly of the ma- 
terials used, being now commonly grown under cheese-cloth even in 
sun-drenched Cuba. The by-products from the maker's bench are 
shipped northward to cigarette factories. Imperfect cigars are culled 
out before the boxing process and consumed locally, being given out 
to the " general help " to the extent, in the larger factories, of five or 
six thousand a month. The workman, however — and here we find 
the present day tyranny of labor maintained even in this far-flung 
island of our southern coast — is paid for every cigar he makes, 
though he may find himself invited to seek employment elsewhere if 
his average of " culls " is too persistently high. It is said that the 
makers of candy never taste the stuff they supply a sweet-tooth world ; 
the same may almost be said of the cigarrcros of Key West. If they 
smoke at all in the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the factories, they are 
far more apt to be addicted to the cigarette than to the product of their 
own handicraft. The smoker, by the way, who visits Key West is 
doomed to disappointment ; cigars are no cheaper there than in the 
most northwestern corner of our land. Nor should he bring with 
him the hope of sampling for once the brands beyond his means. The 
factories treat their swarms of visitors with every courtesy — except 
that of tucking a cigar, either of the five-cent or the dollar variety, 
into a receptive vest pocket. 

The cigar-makers of Key West have one drain upon their income 
which is not common to other professions. Each one contributes a 
small sum weekly to the support of a " reader." A superannuated 
member of the craft sits on a platform overlooking the long roomful 
of eagle-taloned manipulators of the weed and reads aloud to them as 
they work. The custom has all the earmarks of being a direct 
descendant of the doleful dirge with which negro and Indian laborers, 
in the Old as well as the New World, are still in some regions urged 
on to greater exertion. But the reader's calling has lost its romantic 



OVERLAND TO THE WEST INDIES 21 

tinge of earlier days. Those we heard were not droning the poetry 
or the colorful tales of the Castilian classics, but read from a morning 
newspaper printed in Spanish, with special emphasis on the success- 
ful struggles of the " working class " against " capitalists " the world 
over. 

The hurricane that vented its chief fury on the Florida keys early 
in September was still the chief topic of conversation in Key West. 
For two days the inhabitants had been without electricity, gas, or 
transportation ; in most houses even the bread gave out. The damage 
was wide-spread, sparing neither the pipe-organs of churches nor the 
mattresses of family bedrooms. Many a house was reduced to a mere 
heap of broken boards. Sea-walls of stone were strewn in scattered 
bits of rock along the water-fronts ; the roofs of some of the stanchest 
buildings bore gaping holes that carried the memory back to Flanders 
and eastern France. 

Two other routes to the Caribbean converge on this one through 
Key West, those by way of New Orleans and Tampa. The ferry, 
for it is little more than that, which connects the southernmost of 
our cities with Havana is the chief drawback of the overland journey. 
In the first place its rates testify to its freedom from competition, 
fifteen dollars and tax for a bare ninety miles of travel. It is as if 
our ocean-liners demanded $500 for the journey to Liverpool, with- 
out furnishing food or baths on the way. Then, as though the 
continued exactions of passport formalities long after any suitable 
reason for them had passed were not sufficiently troublesome to the 
harassed passenger, his comfort is everywhere second to that of the 
steamer personnel, while the outstretched palm invites special con- 
tribution for even the most shadowy species of service. But once the 
door of his breathless state-room is closed behind him, a brief night's 
sleep, if the inexplicable uproar with which the crew seems to pass its 
time during the journey permits it, brings him to the metropolis of 
the West Indies. A glimpse through the port-hole at an unseasonable 
hour shows the horizon dotted at regular intervals by the arc-lights of 
Havana's Malecon, and by the time he has reached the deck, these 
have faded away in the swift tropical dawn, and the steamer is nosing 
its way through the bottle-mouth of the harbor under the brow of 
age-and-sea-browned Morro Castle. There ensues the inevitable wait 
of an hour or two until the haughty port doctor rises and dresses with 
meticulous care and leisurely sips his morning coffee. When at last 



22 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

he appears, his professional duty does not delay the long file of pas- 
sengers, for the simple reason that his attention is confined to the 
incessant smoking of cigarettes behind his morning newspaper. Pass- 
ports, so sternly required of the departing American, are not even 
worthy of a glance by the Cuban officials ; the custom examination is 
brief and unexacting. Once he has escaped the aggressive maelstrom 
of multicolored humanity which welcomes each new-comer with hope- 
ful shrieks of delight, the traveler quickly merges into the hetero- 
geneous multitude that is as characteristic as its Spanish style of 
architecture of the cosmopolitan capital of Cuba libre. 



THE AMERICAN WEST INDIES 



CHAPTER II 

RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 

A CONSTANT procession of Fords, their mufflers wide open, 
were hiccoughing out the Carlos III Boulevard toward the 
Havana ball-park. The entrance-gate, at which they 
brought up with a snort and a sudden, bronco-like halt that all but 
jerked their passengers to their feet, was a seething hubbub. Ticket- 
speculators, renters of cushions, venders of everything that can be 
consumed on a summer afternoon, were bellowing their wares into 
the ears of the fandticos who scrimmaged about the ticket-window. 
Men a trifle seedy in appearance wandered back and forth holding 
up half a dozen tiny envelopes, arranged in fan-shape, which they were 
evidently trying to sell or rent. The pink entradas I finally succeeded 
in snatching were not, of course, the only tickets needed. That would 
have been too simple a system for Spanish-America. They carried 
us as far as the grand stand, where another maelstrom was surging 
about the chicken-wire wicket behind which a hen-minded youth was 
dispensing permissions to sit down. He would have been more suc- 
cessful in the undertaking if he had not needed to thumb over a hun- 
dred or more seat-coupons reserved for special friends of the manage- 
ment or of himself every time he sought to serve a mere spectator. 

We certainly could not complain, however, of the front-row places 
we obtained except that, in the free-for-all Spanish fashion, all the 
riffraff of venders crowded the foot-rests that were supposedly re- 
served for front-row occupants. Nine nimble Cubans were scattered 
about the flat expanse of Almendares Park, backed by Principe Hill, 
with its crown of university buildings. Royal palms waved their 
plumes languidly in the ocean breeze; a huge Cuban flag undulated 
beyond the outfielders; a score of vultures circled lazily overhead, 
as if awaiting a chance to pounce upon the " dead ones " which the 
wrathful " fans " announced every time a player failed to live up to 
their hopes. On a bench in the shade sat all but one of the invading 
team, our own " Pirates " from the Smoky City. The missing one 
was swinging his club alertly at the home plate, his eyes glued on the 

25 



26 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Cuban zurdo, or " south-paw," who had just begun his contortions in 
the middle of the diamond. The scene itself was familiar enough, 
yet it seemed strangely out of place in this tropical setting. It was 
like coming upon a picture one had known since childhood, to find it 
inclosed in a brand new frame. 

I reached for my kodak, then restrained the impulse. A camera 
is of little use at a Cuban ball game. Only a recording phonograph 
could catch its chief novelties. An uproar as incessant as that of a 
rolling-mill drowned every individual sound. It was not merely the 
venders of " El escor oficial," of sandwiches, lottery-tickets, cigars, 
cigarettes, of bottled beer by the basketful, who created the hubbub ; 
the spectators themselves made most of it. The long, two-story grand- 
stand behind us was packed with Cubans of every shade from ebony 
black to the pasty white of the tropics, and every man of them seemed to 
be shouting at the top of his well-trained lungs. I say " man " ad- 
visedly, for with the exception of my wife there were just three women 
present, and they had the hangdog air of culprits. Scores of them 
were on their feet, screaming at their neighbors and waving their hands 
wildly in the air. An uninformed observer would have supposed that 
the entire throng was on the verge of a free-for-all fight, instead of 
enjoying themselves in the Cuban's chief pastime. 

" Which do you like best, baseball or bull-fights ? " I shouted to my 
neighbor on the left. He was every inch a Cuban, by birth, environ- 
ment, point of view, in his very gestures, and he spoke not a word of 
English. Generations of Spanish ancestry were plainly visible through 
his grayish features ; I happened to know that he had applauded many 
a torero in the days before the rule of Spain and " the bulls " had been 
banished together. Yet he answered instantly : 

" Baseball by far ; and so do all Cubans." 

But baseball, strictly speaking, is not what the Cuban enjoys most. 
It is rather the gambling that goes with it. Like every sport of the 
Spanish-speaking race, with the single exception of bull-fighting, base- 
ball to the great majority is merely a pretext for betting. The throng 
behind us was everywhere waving handsful of money, real American 
money, for Cuba has none of her own larger than the silver dollar. 
Small wonder the bills are always ragged and worn and half obliter- 
ated, for they were constantly passing, like crumpled waste-paper, 
from one sweaty hand to another. The Piatt Amendment showed 
incomplete knowledge of Cuban conditions when it decreed the use 
of American money on the island; it should have gone further and 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 27 

ordered the bills destined for Cuba to be made of linoleum. Bets 
passed at the speed of sleight-of-hand performances. The fandticos 
bet on every swing of the batter's club, on every ball that rose into the 
air, on whether or not a runner would reach the next base, on how 
many fouls the inning would produce. Most of the wagers passed 
so quickly that there was no time for the actual exchange of money. 
A flip of the fingers or a nod of the head sufficed to arrange the deal. 
There were no dividing lines either of color or distance. Full-fledged 
Africans exchanged wagers with men of pure Spanish blood. Cabalis- 
tic signs passed between the grand-stand and the sort of royal box 
high above. Across the field the crowded sol, as the Cuban calls the 
unshaded bleachers, in the vocabulary of the bull-ring, was engaged 
in the same money-waving turmoil. The curb market of New York 
is slow, noiseless, and phlegmatic compared with a ball-game in Havana. 

Close in front of us other venders of the mysterious little envelopes 
wandered back and forth, seldom attempting to make themselves heard 
above the constant din. Here and there a spectator exchanged a 
crumpled, almost illegible dollar bill for one of the sealed sobrcs. My 
neighbor on the left bought one and held it for some time between his 
ringed fingers. When at last a runner reached first base he tore the 
envelope open. It contained a tiny slip of paper on which was type- 
written " ia base; ia carrera" (1st base; 1st run). The purchaser 
swore in Spanish with artistic fluency. I asked the reason for his 
wrath. He displayed the typewritten slip and grumbled " mala 
suerte " ; then, noting my puzzled expression, explained his " bad luck " 
in the patient voice of a man who found it strange that an American 
should not understand his own national game. 

" This envelope, which is bought and sold ' blind ' — that is, neither 
I nor the man who sold it to me knew -what was in it — is a bet that the 
first run will be made by a first baseman, of either side. But the man 
who has just reached first base is the rrri' fiel', and the first baseman 
is the man who struck out just before him. If he had made the first 
run I should have won eight dollars. But you see what chance he has 
now to make the first carrera. Cursed bad luck ! " 

" Rrri' fiel'," however, " died " in a vain attempt to steal third base, 
and his partner from the opposite corner of the garden was the first 
man to cross the home-plate. Instantly a cry of " LeP fiel' " rose 
above the hubbub and the erstwhile venders of envelopes began paying 
the winners. A lath-like individual, half Chinaman, half negro, whom 
the fandticos called " Chino," took charge of the section about us, and 



28 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

handed eight greasy bills to all those whom luck had favored, tucking 
the winning slips of paper into a pocket of his linen coat. But these 
simple little wagers were only for " pikers." There were men behind 
us who, though they looked scarcely capable of paying for their next 
meal, were stripping twenty and even fifty dollar bills off the rolls 
clutched in their sweaty hands and distributing them like so many 
handbills. 

The game itself was little different from one at home. The Cuban 
players varied widely in color, from the jet-black third baseman to a 
shortstop of rice-powder complexion. Their playing was of high or- 
der, quite as " fast " as the average teams of our big leagues. Cubans 
hold several world championships in sports requiring a high degree 
of skill and swiftness. The umpire in his protective paraphernalia 
looked quite like his fellows of the North, yet behind his mask he was 
a rich mahogany brown. His official speech was English, but when 
a dispute arose he changed quickly to voluble Spanish. The " bn- 
cancros," as the present-day pirates who had descended upon the 
Cuban coast were best known locally, won the game on this occasion; 
but the day before they had not scored a run. 

Baseball — commonly pronounced " bahseh-bahl " throughout the 
island — has won a firm foothold in Cuba. Boys of all colors play it 
on every vacant lot in Havana ; it is the favorite sport of the youthful 
employees of every sugar estate or tobacco vega of the interior. The 
sporting page is as fixed a feature of the Havana newspapers as of our 
own dailies. Nor do the Cuban reporters yield to their fellows of the 
North in the use of base-ball slang. Most of their expressions are 
direct translations of our own vocabulary of the diamond ; some of 
them are of local concoction. Those familiar with Spanish can find 
constant amusement in Havana's sporting pages. " Fans " quite un- 
familiar with the tongue would experience no great difficulty in catch- 
ing the drift of the Cuban reporter, though it would be Greek to a 
Spaniard speaking no baseball, as a brief example will demonstrate: 

EL HABANA DEJO EN BLANCO 

A LOS PIRATAS 

Jose del Carmen Rodriguez realizo varios doubleplays sensacionales 

BRILLANTE PITCHING DE TUERO 

El catcher rojo, Miguel Angel Gonzalez, cerro con doble Have la segunda base 

a los corredores americanos 
Primer Inning 
Bucaneros — Bigbee out en fly al center. Terry, rolling al short, out en pri- 
mera. Carey struck out. No hit, no run. 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 29 

Habana — Papo out en fly al catcher. Merito muere en rolling al pitcher. 
Cueto lo imita. 

Segundo Inning 

Bucaneros — Nickolson, rolling al tercera, es out al pretender robar la segunda. 
Cutshaw batea de plancha y es safe en primera. Barber out en rolling a la 
segunda, adelantando Cutshaw. Carlson out en fly al catcher. No hit, no run. 

Habana Juan de Angel Aragon out en linea al center. Hungo se pasea. 

Calvo hit y Hungo va a segunda. Torres se sacrifica. Acosta, con las bases 
llenas, es transferido y Hungo anota. Gonzalez out en foul al pitcher. Un hit, 
una carrera. 

Thus the Havanese " reporter de baseball " rattles on, but his re- 
ports are not snatched from the hands of newsboys with quite the same 
eagerness as in the North. For the Cuban fandtico is not particularly 
interested in the outcome of the game itself. A bet on that would be 
too slowly decided for his quick southern temperament. He prefers 
to set a wager on each swing of the pitcher's arm, and with the last 
" out " of the ninth inning his interest ceases as abruptly as does the 
unbroken boiler-factory uproar that rises to the blue tropical heavens 
from the first to the last swing of the batter's club. 

The visitor whose picture of Havana is still that of the drowsy 
tropical city of our school-books is due for a shock. He will be most 
surprised, perhaps, to find the place as swarming with automobiles 
as an open honey-pot with flies. A local paragrapher asserts that " a 
Havanese would rather die than walk four blocks." There are several 
perfectly good reasons for this preference. The heat of Cuba is far 
less oppressive than that of our most northern states in mid-summer. 
Indeed, it is seldom unpleasant ; but the slightest physical exertion 
quickly bathes the body in perspiration, and nowhere is a wilted collar 
in worse form than in Havana. Moreover, one must be exceedingly 
nimble-footed to trust to the prehistoric means of transportation. The 
custom of always riding has left no rights to the pedestrian in the 
Cuban capital. The chances of being run down are excellent, and the 
result is apt to be not merely broken ribs, but a bill for damages to the 
machine. Hence the expression " cojemos un For' " is synonymous 
with going a journey, however short, anywhere within the city. Your 
Havanese friend never says, " Let 's stroll around and see Perez," but 
always, " Let 's catch a Ford," and by the time you have succeeded in 
slamming the door really shut, there you are at Perez's zaguan. 

Fords scurry by thousands through the streets of Havana day and 



3 o ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

night, ever ready to pick up a passenger or two and set them down 
again in any part of the business section for a mere twenty-cent piece 
— a peseta in Cuban parlance. More expensive cars are now and then 
seen for hire ; by dint of sleuth-like observation I did discover one 
Ford that was confined to the labor of carrying its owner. But those 
are the exceptions that prove the rule, and the rule is that the instant 
you catch sight of the familiar plebeian features of a " flivver " you 
know, even without waiting to see the hospitable " Se Alquila " (" Rents 
Itself ") on the wind-shield, that you need walk no farther, whatever 
your sex, complexion, or previous condition of pedestrianism. They 
are particularly suited to the narrow streets that the Spaniard, in his 
Arabic avoidance of the sun, bequeathed the Cuban capital. There is 
many a corner in the business section which larger cars can turn only 
by backing or by mounting one of the scanty sidewalks. The closed 
taxi of the North, too, would be as much out of place in Havana as 
overcoats at a Fourth of July celebration. A few of the horse car- 
riages of olden days still offer their services ; but as neither driver, 
carriage, nor steed seems to have been groomed or fed since the war of 
independence, even those in no haste are apt to think twice or thrice, 
and finally put their trust in gasolene. Hence the Ford has taken 
charge of Havana, like an army of occupation. 

Unfortunately, a Ford and a Cuban chauffeur make a bad com- 
bination. The native temperament is quick-witted, but it is scantily 
gifted with patience. In the hands of a seeker after pesetas a " flivver " 
becomes a prancing, dancing steed, a snorting charger that knows no 
fear and yields to no rival. Apparently some Cuban Burbank has 
succeeded in crossing the laggard of our northern highways with the 
kangaroo. The whisper of your destination in the driver's ear is 
followed by a leap that leaves the adjoining fagades a mere blur upon 
the retina. A traffic jam ahead lends the snorting beast wings; it 
has a playful way of alighting on all fours in the very heart of any 
turmoil. If a pedestrian or a rival peseta-gatherer is crossing the 
street twenty feet beyond, your time for the next nineteen feet and 
eleven inches is a small fraction of a second over nothing. Brake 
linings seem to acquire a strangle hold from the Cuban climate. If 
the opening ahead is but the breadth of a hand, the Havana Ford has 
some secret of making itself still more slender. I have never yet seen 
one of them climb a palm-tree, but there is no reason to suppose that 
they would hesitate to undertake that simple feat, if a passenger's 
destination were among the fronds. 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 31 

The newspapers run a daily column for those who have been 
" Ford-ed " to hospitals or cemeteries. What are a few casualties a 
day in a city of nearly half a million, with prolific tendencies? There 
are voluminous traffic and speed rules, but he would be a friendless 
fellow who could not find a compadre with sufficient political power 
to " fix it up." Death corners — bill-boards or street-hugging house- 
walls from behind which he may dart without warning — are the joy 
of the Cuban chauffeur. Courtesy in personal intercourse stands on a 
high plane in Havana, but automobile politeness has not yet reached 
the stage of consideration for others. Traffic policemen, soldierly 
fellows widely varied in complexion, looking like bandsmen in their 
blue denim uniforms, are efficient, and accustomed to be obeyed; but 
they cannot be everywhere at once, and the automobile is. They con- 
fine their efforts, therefore, to a few seething corners, and humanity 
trusts to its own lucky star in the no-man's-lands between. 

The private machines alone would give Havana a busy appearance. 
All day long and far into the night the big central plaza is completely 
fenced in by splendid cars parked compactly ends to curb. Toward 
sunset, especially on the days when a military band plays the retreta 
in the kiosk facing Morro Castle and the harbor entrance, an endless 
procession of seven-passenger motors files up and down the wide Prado 
and along the sea-washed Malecon, two, or at most three, haughty be- 
ings, not infrequently with kinky hair, lolling in every capacious ton- 
neau. Liveried chauffeurs are the almost universal rule. The cabal- 
lero who drives his own car would arouse the wonder, possibly the 
scorn, of his fellow-citizens ; once and once only did we see a woman 
at the wheel. There is good reason for this. The man who would 
learn to pilot his own machine through the automobile maelstrom of 
Havana would have little time or energy left for the pursuit of his 
profession. Moreover, the Latin-American is seldom mechanic- 
minded. The cheaper grades of cars are not in favor for private use. 
Wire wheels are almost universal ; luxurious fittings are seldom lack- 
ing. Even the unexclusive Ford is certain to be decked out in ex- 
pensive vestidnras, — slip-covers of embossed leather that remind one 
of a Mexican peon in silver-mounted sombrero. 

The cost of a car in Havana is from twenty to thirty per cent, higher 
than in the States, which supplies virtually all of them. A dollar barely 
pays for two gallons of gasolene. Licenses are a serious item, par- 
ticularly to private owners in Havana, for the fee depends on the use 
j to which the car is put. Fords for hire carry a white tag with black 



32 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

figures and pay $12.50 a year. Private cars bear a pink chapa at a 
cost of $62.50. Tags with blue figures announce the occupant a gov- 
ernment official or a physician. Then, every driver must be supplied 
with a personal license, at a cost of $25. In theory that is all, except 
a day or two of waiting in line at the municipal license bureau. In 
practice there are many little political wheels to be oiled if one would 
see the car free to go its way the same year it is purchased. 

Once the visitor has learned to distinguish the tag that announces 
government ownership, he will be astounded to note its extraordinary 
prevalence in Havana. Even Washington was never like this. Gov- 
ernment property means public ownership indeed in Cuba. If one 
may believe the newspapers of the Liberal party, — the " outs " under 
the present administration, — the explanation is simple. " Every gov- 
erment employee," they shriek, " down to the last post-office clerk who 
is in personal favor, has his own private car, free of cost ; not only that, 
but he may use it to give his babies an airing, to carry his cook to 
market, or to take the future novio of his daughter on a joy ride." 

The new-comer's impressions of Havana will depend largely upon 
his previous travels. If this is his first contact with the Iberian or 
the Latin-American civilization, he will find the Cuban capital of great 
interest. If he is familiar with the cities of old Spain, particularly if 
he has already seen her farthest-flung descendants, such as Bogota, 
Quito, or La Paz, he will probably call Havana " tame." The most 
incorrigible traveler will certainly not consider a visit to this most ac- 
cessible of foreign capitals time wasted. But his chief amusement will 
be, in all likelihood, that of tracing the curious dovetailing of Spanish 
and American influences which makes up its present-day aspect. 

Both by situation and history the capital of Cuba is a natural place 
for this intermingling of two essentially different civilizations, but 
the mixture is more like that of oil and water than of two related ele- 
ments. The ways of Spain and of America — by which, of course, I 
mean the United States — are recognizable in every block of Havana, 
yet there has been but slight blending together, however close the con- 
tact. Immigrants from old Spain tramp the streets all day under their 
strings of garlic, or jingle the cymbals that mean sweetmeats for sale to 
all Spanish-speaking children. Venders of lottery-tickets sing their 
numbers in every public gathering-place. On Saturdays a long pro- 
cession of beggars of both sexes file through the stores and offices de- 
manding almost as a right the cent each which ancient Iberian custom 



: 




Vendors of lottery tickets in rural Cuba 






t F" 




cSP'»' i 

The winning numbers of the lottery 




Pigeons are kept to clear the tobacco fields of insects 




ar aggBS» i .'&l 



Ploughing for tobacco in the famous Vuelta Abaja district. The large building is a tobacco 
barn, the small ones are residences of the planters 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 33 

allots them. The places where men gather are wide-open cafes with- 
out front walls, rather than the hidden dens of the North. Havana's 
cooking, her modes of greeting and parting, her patience with individual 
nuisance, her very table manners are Spanish. Like all Spanish- 
America, her sons and daughters are highly proficient in the use of 
the toothpick; like them they are exceedingly courteous in the forms 
of social intercourse, irrespective of class. As in Spain, life increases 
in its intensity with sunset : babies have no fixed hour of retirement ; 
midnight is everywhere the " shank of the evening " ; lovers are sternly 
separated by iron bars, or their soft nothings strictly censored by ever 
vigilant duennas. 

The very Government cannot shake off the habits of its forebears, 
despite the tutelage of a more practical race. Public office is more 
apt than not to be considered a legitimate source of personal gain. As 
in Spain, a general amnesty is ever smiling hopefully at imprisoned 
malefactors. The Spanish tendency to forgive crime, combined with 
the interrelationship of miscreants and the powers that be, has not 
merely abolished, in practice, all capital punishment ; it tends to release 
evil-doers long before they have found time to repent and change their 
ways. Men who shoot down in cold blood — and this they do even 
in the heart of Havana — have only to prove that the deed was done 
"in the heat of the moment" to have their punishment reduced to a 
mere fraction of that for stealing a mule. The pardoning power is 
wielded with such Castilian generosity that the genial editor of Havana's 
American newspaper wrathfully suggests the " loosing of all our dis- 
tinguished assassins," that the enormous cdrcel facing the harbor en- 
trance may be replaced by one of the hotels sadly needed to house 
Havana's " distinguished visitors." 

Amid all this the island capital is deeply marked, too, with the in- 
fluence of what Latin-America calls " the Colossus of the North." 
One sees it in the strenuous pace of business, in the manners and 
methods of commerce. The dignified lethargy of Spain has largely 
given way to the business-first teachings of the Yankee gospel. Bill- 
boards are almost as constant eyesores in Havana and her suburbs as 
in New York; huge electric figures flash the alleged virtues of wares 
far into the soft summer nights. Blocks of office buildings, modern 
in every particular, shoulder their way upward into the tropical sky. 
With few exceptions the sons of proud old Cuban families scorn to 
dally away their lives, Castilian fashion, on the riches and reputations 
cf their ancestors, but descend into "the commercial fray. 



34 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

One sees the American influence in many amusing little details. 
The Cuban mail-boxes are exact copies of our own, except that the 
lettering is Spanish. Postage-stamps may be had in booklet form, 
which can be said of no other foreign land. Street-car fares are five 
cents for any distance, with free transfers, rather than varying by 
zones, as in Europe. Barbers dally over their clients in the private- 
valet manner of their fellows to the north. Department stores operate 
as nearly as possible on the American plan, despite the Spanish ten- 
dency of their clerks to seek tips. Cuban advertisers struggle to imi- 
tate in their newspaper and poster announcements the aggressive, in- 
viting American manner, often with ludicrous results, for they are 
rarely gifted with what might be called the advertising imagination. 
In a word, Havana is Spain with a modern American virility, tinged 
with a generous dash of the tropics. 

I have said that -the two opposing influences do not mix, and in the 
main that rule -strictly holds. A glance at any detail of the city's life, 
her customs, appearance, or point of view, suffices to determine whether 
ii is of Castilian or Yankee origin. But here and there a fusing of 
the two has produced a quaint mongrel of local color. Havana bakes 
its bread in the long loaves of Europe, but an American squeamishness 
has evolved a slender paper bag to cover them. The language of ges- 
tures makes a crossing of two figures, a hiss at the conductor, and a 
nod to right or left, sufficient request for a street-car transfer. The 
man who occupies the center of a baseball diamond may be called 
either a pitcher or a lanzador, but the verb that expresses his activity is 
pitchcar. Shoe-shining establishments in the shade of the long, pillared 
arcades are arranged in Spanish style, yet the methods and the prices 
of the polishers are American. 

Barely had we stepped ashore in Havana when I spied a man in the 
familiar uniform of the American Army, his upper sleeve decorated 
with three broad chevrons. I had a hazy notion that our intervention 
in Cuba had ceased some time before, yet it would have been nothing 
strange if some of our troops had been left on the island. 

" Good morning, Sergeant," I greeted him. " Do you know this 
town ? How do I get to — " 

But he was staring at me with a puzzled air, and before I could 
finish he had sidestepped and hurried on. I must have been dense 
that morning, after a night of uproar on the steamer from Key West, 
for a score of his fellows had passed before I awoke to the fact that 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 35 

they were not American soldiers at all. Cuba has copied nothing 
more exactly than our army uniform. Cotton khaki survives in place 
of olive drab, of course, as befits the Cuban climate ; frequent wash- 
ings have turned most of the canvas leggings a creamy white. Other- 
wise there is little to distinguish the Cuban soldier from our own until 
he opens his mouth in a spurt of fluent Spanish. He wears the same 
cow-boy sombrero, with similar hat-cords for each branch of the 
service. He shoulders the same rifle, carries his cartridges in the old 
familiar web-belt, wears his revolver on the right, as distinct from the 
left-handed fashion of all the rest of Latin-America. He salutes, 
mounts guard, drills, stands at attention precisely in the American 
manner, for his " I. D. R." differs from our own only in tongue. The 
same chevrons indicate non-commissioned rank, though they have not 
yet disappeared from the left sleeve. His officers are indistinguishable, 
at any distance, from our own ; they are in many cases graduates of 
West Point. An angle in their shoulder-bars, with the Cuban seal in 
bronze above them, and the native coat of arms on their caps in place 
of the spread eagle, are the only differences that a close inspection of 
lieutenants or captains brings to light. From majors upward, how- 
ever, the insignia becomes a series of stars, perhaps because the ab- 
sence of generals in the Cuban Army leaves no other chance for such 
ostentation. 

The question naturally suggests itself, "Why does Cuba need an 
army? " The native answer is apt to be the Spanish version of " Huh, 
we 're a free country, are n't we ? Why should n't we have an army, 
like any other sovereign people? Poor Estrada Palma, our first presi- 
dent, had no army, with the result that the first bunch of hoodlums to 
start a revolution had him at their mercy." 

These are the two reasons why one sees the streets of Havana, and 
all Cuba, for that matter, khaki-dotted with soldiers. She has no de- 
signs on a trembling world, but an army is to her what long trousers 
are to a youth of sixteen, proof of his manhood ; and she has very real 
need of one to keep the internal peace within the country, particularly 
under a Government that was not legally elected and which enjoys little 
popularity. 

There were some fourteen thousand " regulars " in the Cuban Army 
before the European War, a number that was more than tripled un- 
der compulsory service after the island republic joined the Allies. 
To-day, despite posters idealizing the soldier's life and assuring all 
Cubans that it is their duty to enlist, despite a scale of pay equalling our 



36 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

own, their land force numbers barely five thousand. Many of these 
are veterans of the great European war, — as fought in Pensacola, 
Florida. Some wear fifteen to eighteen years' worth of service stripes 
diagonally across their lower sleeves ; a few played their part in the 
guerilla warfare against the Spaniards before the days of indepen- 
dence, and have many a thrilling anecdote with which to overawe each 
new group of " rookies." In short, they have nearly everything in 
common with our own permanent soldiers — except the color-line. 
I have yet to see a squad of white, or partly white, American soldiers 
march away to duty under a jet-black corporal, a sight so common-place 
in Havana as not even to attract a passing attention. 

Havana has just celebrated her four-hundredth birthday. She con- 
fesses herself the oldest city of European origin in the western hemi- 
sphere. Her name was familiar to ocean wayfarers before Cortes 
penetrated to the Vale of Anahuac, before Pizarro had heard the first 
rumors of the mysterious land of the Incas. When the Pilgrim Fathers 
sighted Plymouth Rock, Havana had begun the second century of her 
existence. In view of all this, and of the harried career she led clear 
down to days within the memory of men who still consider themselves 
youthful, she is somewhat disappointing to the mere tourist for her 
lack of historical relics. This impression, however, gradually wears 
off. Her background is certainly not to be compared with that of 
Cuzco or of the City of Mexico, stretching away into the prehistoric 
days of legend; yet many reminders of the times that are gone peer 
through the mantle of modernity in which she has wrapped herself. 
From the age-worn stones of La Fuerza the bustle of the city of to-day 
seems a fantasy from dreamland. In the underground passages of old 
Morro, in the musty dungeons of massive Cabana, the khaki-clad sol- 
diers of Cuba's new army look as out of place as motor-cars in a Roman 
arena. The stroller who catches a sudden unexpected glimpse of the 
cathedral faqade is carried back in a twinkling to the days of the In- 
quisition ; Spain herself can show no closer link with the Middle Ages 
than the venerable stone face of San Francisco de Paula. The ghosts 
of monks gone to their reward centuries ago hover about the post-office 
where the modern visitor files his telegram or stamps his picture postals. 
The British occupied it as a barracks when they captured Havana in 
the middle of the last century, whereby the ancient monastery was con- 
sidered desecrated, and has served in turn various government pur- 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 37 

poses ; yet the shades of the past still linger in its flowery patio and flit 
about the corners of its capacious, leisurely old stairways. 

Old Havana may be likened in shape to the head of a bulldog, with 
the mark of the former city wall, which inclosed it like a muzzle, still 
visible. The part thus protected in olden days contains most of 
Havana's antiquity. Beyond it the streets grow wider, the buildings 
more modern, as one advances to the newer residential suburbs. Amus- 
ing contrasts catch the eye at every turn within the muzzled portion. 
Calle Obispo, still the principal business street, is a scant eighteen feet 
wide, inclusive of its two pathetically narrow sidewalks. The Span- 
ish builders did not foresee the day when it would be an impassable 
river of clamoring automobiles. They would be struck dumb with 
astonishment to see these strange devil-wagons housed in the tiled 
passageways behind the massive carved or brass-studded doors of the 
regal mansions of colonial days, as their fair ladies would be horrified 
to find the family chapels turned into bath-rooms by desecrating bar- 
barians from the North. Office buildings that seem to have been bodily 
transported from New York shoulder age-crumbled Spanish churches 
and convents ; crowds as business-bent as those of Wall Street hurry 
through narrow callejones that seem still to be thinking of Columbus 
and the buccaneers of the Spanish main. Long rows of massive pillars 
upholding projecting second stories and half concealing the den-like 
shops behind them have a picturesque appearance and afford a needed 
protection from the Cuban sun, but they are little short of a nuisance 
under modern traffic conditions. Old Colon market is as dark and un- 
sanitary as when mistresses sent a trusted slave to make the day's pur- 
chases. Its long lines of cackling fowls, of meat barely dead, of tropical 
fruits and strange Cuban vegetables, are still the center of the old 
bartering hubbub, but beside them are the very latest factory products. 
One may buy a chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot for a 
real by deep-eyed old women who seem to have been left behind by a 
receding generation, or one may carry home canned food which colonial 
Havana never tasted. 

The city is as brilliantly lighted as any of our own, by dusky men 
who come at sunset, laboriously carrying long ladders, from the tops 
of which they touch off each gas jet as in the days of Tacon. Fer- 
ries as modern as those bridging the Hudson ply between the Muelle 
de Luz and the fortresses and towns across the harbor; but they still 
have as competitors the heavy old Havana rowboats, equipped, when 



38 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the sun is high, with awnings at the rear, and manned by oarsmen as 
stout-armed and weather-tanned as the gondoliers of Venice. Auto- 
mobiles of the latest model snort in continual procession around the 
Malecon on Sunday afternoons, yet here and there a quaint old family 
carriage, with its liveried footmen, jogs along between them. Many 
a street has changed its name since the days of independence, but still 
clings to its old Spanish title in popular parlance. A new system of 
house numbering, too, has been adopted, but this has not superseded 
the old ; it has merely been superimposed upon it, until it is a wise door 
indeed that knows its own number. To make things worse for the 
puzzled stranger, the two sides of the street have nothing in common, 
so that it is nothing unusual to find house No. 7 opposite No. 1 14. 

Havana is most beautiful at night. Its walls are light in color, yel- 
low, orange, pink, pale-blue, and the like prevailing, and the witchery 
of moonlight, falling upon them, gives many a quaint corner or nar- 
row street of the old city a resemblance to fairy-land. But when one 
hurries back to catch them with a kodak in the morning, it is only to 
find that the chief charm has fled before the grueling light of day. 

The architecture of the city is overwhelmingly Spanish, with only 
here and there a detail brought from the North. The change from the 
wooden houses of Key West, with their steep shingled roofs, to the 
plaster-faced edifices of Havana, covered by the flat azotcas of Arab- 
Iberian origin often the family sitting-room after sunset, is sharp and 
decided. Among them the visitor feels himself in a foreign land in- 
deed, whatever suggestions of his own he may find in the life of the 
city. The tendency for low structures, the prevalence of sumptuous 
dwellings of a single story, the preference for the ground floor as a 
place of residence, show at a glance that this is no American city. 
Yet the single story is almost as lofty as two of our own; the Cuban 
insists on high ceilings, and the longest rooms of the average residence 
would be still longer if they were laid on their sides. To our Northern 
iyes it is a heavy architecture, but it is a natural development in the 
Cuban climate. Coolness is the first and prime requisite. Massive 
outer walls, half their surfaces taken up by immense doors and win- 
dows, protected by gratings in every manner of artistic scroll, defy 
the heat of perpetual summer, and at the same time give free play 
to the all but constant sea breezes. The openness of living which this 
style of dwelling brings with it would not appeal to the American sense 
of privacy in family life. Through the iron-barred re) as, flush with 
the sidewalk, the passer-by may look deep back into the tile-floored 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 39 

parlor, with its forest of chairs, and often into the living-rooms be- 
yond. At midday they look particularly cool and inviting from the 
sun-drenched street ; in the evening the stroller has a sense of saunter- 
ing unmolested through the very heart of a hundred family circles. 

Old residents tell us that Havana is a far different city from the one 
from which the Spanish flag was banished twenty years ago. Its best 
streets, they say, were then mere lanes of mud, or their cobbled pave- 
ments so far down beneath the filth of generations that the uncovering 
of them resembled a mining operation. Along the sea, where a boule- 
vard •second only to the peerless Beira Mar of Rio runs to-day, the last 
century left a stenching city garbage-heap. The broad, laurel-shaded 
Prado leading from the beautiful central plaza to the headland facing 
Morro Castle was a labyrinthian cluster of unsavory hovels. All 
this, if one may be pardoned a suggestion of boasting, was accom- 
plished by the first American governor. But the Cubans themselves 
have continued the good work. Once cleaned and paved, the streets 
have remained so. Buildings of which any city might be proud have 
been erected without foreign assistance. In their sudden spurt of 
ambition the Cubans have sometimes overreached themselves. A 
former administration began the erection of a presidential palace des- 
tined to rival the best of Europe. About the same time the provincial 
governor concluded to build himself a simple little marble cabin. Elec- 
tion day came, and the new president, after the spendthrift manner 
of Latin-American executives, repudiated the undertaking of his 
predecessor, which lies to-day the abandoned grave of several million 
pesos. The f:overnor of the province was convinced by irrefutable 
arguments tha i;is half-finished little cabin was out of proportion to his 
importance, ana yielded it to his political superior. It is nearing com- 
pletion now, a thing of beauty that should, for a time at least, satisfy 
the artistic longings even of great Cuba. For it has nothing of the 
inexpensive Jeffersonian simplicity of our own White House, fit only 
for such plebeian occupants as our Lincolns and Garfields, but is worthy 
a Cuban president — during the few months of the year when he is 
not occupying his suburban or his summer palace. 

Havana has grown in breadth as well as character since it became 
the capital of a free country. While the population of the island has 
nearly doubled, that of the metropolis has trebled. Vibora, Cerro, and 
Jesus del Monte have changed from outlying country villages of 
thatched huts to thriving suburbs ; Vedado, the abode of a few scat- 
tered farmers when the Treaty of Paris was signed, has become a great 



4 o ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

residential region where s-ugar-millionaires and successful politicians 
vie with one another in the erection of private palaces, not to mention 
the occasional perpetration of architectural monstrosities. Under the 
impulse of an ever-increasing and ever-wealthier population, abetted 
by energetic young Cubans who have copied American real-estate meth- 
ods, Havana is already leaping like a prairie fire to the crests of new 
fields, which will soon be wholly embraced in the conflagration of 
prosperity. 

One of the purposes of Cuba's revolt against Spain was the sup- 
pression of the lottery. For years the new republic sternly frowned 
down any tendency toward a return of this particular form of vice. 
To this day it is unlawful to bring the tickets of the Spanish lottery 
into the island. But blood will tell, and the mere winning of political 
freedom could not cure the Cuban of his love for gambling. Private 
games of chance increased in number and spread throughout the 
island. The Government saw itself losing millions of revenue yearly, 
while enterprising persons enriched themselves; for to all- rulers of 
Iberian ancestry the exploitation of a people's gambling instinct seems 
a legitimate source of state income. New palaces and boulevards cost 
money, independence brings with it unexpected expenditures. By the 
end of the second intervention the free Cubans were looking with favor 
upon a system which they had professed to abhor as Spanish subjects. 
The law of July 7, 1909, decreed a public revenue under the name of 
" Loteria Nacional," and to-day the lottery is as firmly established a 
function of the Government as the postal service. 

There are two advantages in a state lottery — to t c government. 
It is not only an unfailing source of revenue; it is a ^p. ndid means 
of rewarding political henchmen. Colcctorias, the privilege of dis- 
pensing lottery-tickets within a given district, are to the Cuban con- 
gressman what postmasterships are to our own. The possession of 
one is a botella (bottle), Cuban slang for sinecure; the lucky possessor 
is called a botellero. He in turn distributes his patronage to the lesser 
fry and becomes a political power within his district. The whole makes 
a splendidly compact machine that can be turned to any purpose by 
the chauffeur at the political wheel. 

The first and indispensible requisite of a state lottery is that the 
drawings shall be honest. Your Spanish-minded citizen will no more 
do without his gambling than he will drink water with his meals; but 
let him for a moment suspect that " the game is crooked " and he will 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 41 

abandon the purchase of government tickets for some other means of 
snatching sudden fortune. The drawing of the Cuban lottery is sur- 
rounded by every possible check on dishonesty. By no conceivable 
chance could the inmost circle of the inner lottery councils guess 
the winning number an instant before it is publicly drawn. But there 
is another way in which the game is not a " fair shake " to the players, 
though the simpler type of Cuban does not recognise the unfairness. 
The average lottery, for instance, offers $420,000 in prizes. The legal 
price of the tickets is $20, divided into a hundred " pieces " for the con- 
venience of small gamblers, at a peseta each. Thirty thousand tickets 
are sold, of which 30% of the proceeds, or $180,000, goes to the gov- 
ernment or its favorite henchmen. That leaves to begin with only 
fourteen of his twenty cents that can come back to the player. Then 
the law allows the vendor 5% as his profit, bringing the fractional 
ticket up to twenty-one cents. If that were all, the players would still 
have even chances of a reasonable return. But the " pieces " are never 
sold at that price, despite the law and its threat of dire punishment, 
printed on the ticket itself. From one end of the island to the other 
the billeteros demand at least $30 a billete; in other words the public 
is taxed one half as much as it puts into the lottery itself to support 
thousands of utterly useless members of society, the ticket-sellers, and 
instead of getting two-thirds of its money back it has a chance of re- 
winning less than half the sum hazarded. The most optimistic negro 
deckhand on a Missississippi steamboat -would hardly enter a crap 
game in which the " bones " were so palpably " loaded." Yet Cubans 
of high and low degree, from big merchants to bootblacks, pay their 
tribute regularly to the Loteria National. 

Barely had we arrived in Havana when the rumor reached me that 
the billeteros could be compelled to sell their tickets at the legal price, 
if one " had the nerve " to insist. I abhor a financial dispute, but I 
have as little use for hearsay evidence. I concluded to test the great 
question personally. Having purchased two " pieces " at the customary 
price, to forestall any charge of miserliness, I set out to buy one at the 
lawful rate. A booth on a busy corner of Calle Obispo, a large choice 
of numbers fluttering from its ticket-racks, seemed the most promising 
scene for my nefarious project, because a traffic policeman stood close 
by. I chose a " piece " and, having tucked it away in a pocket, handed 
the vender a peseta. 

" It is thirty cents," he announced politely, smiling at what he took 
to be my American innocence. 



42 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

" Not at all," I answered, blushing at my own pettiness. " The 
price is twenty cents ; it is printed on the ticket." 

" / sell them only at thirty," he replied, with a gesture that invited me 
to return the ticket. 

" The legal price is all I pay," I retorted. " If you don't like that, 
call the policeman," and I strolled slowly on. In an instant both the 
vender and the officer -were hurrying after me. The latter demanded 
why I had not paid the amount asked. 

" The law sets the price at twenty cents," I explained. " As a guar- 
dian of order, you surely do not mean to help this man collect an illegal 
sum." 

The policeman gave me a look of scorn such as he might have turned 
upon a millionaire caught stealing chickens, and answered with a sneer: 

" He is entitled to one cent profit." 

" But not to ten cents," I added triumphantly. 

The guardian of law and order grunted an unwilling affirmative, 
casting a pitying glance up and down my person, and turned away with 
another audible sneer only when I had produced a cent. The vender 
snatched the coin with an expression of disgust, and retains to this day, 
I suppose, a much lower opinion of Americans. 

This -silly ordeal, which I have never since had the courage to repeat, 
proved the assertion that the Cubans may buy their lottery-tickets at 
the legal price, but it demonstrated at the same time why few of them 
do so. Pride is the chief ally of the profiteer. The difference between 
twenty cents and thirty is not worth a dispute, but the failure of the 
individual Cuban to insist upon his rights, and of his Government to 
protect them, constitutes a serious tax upon the nation and enriches 
many a worthless loafer. With some forty lottery drawings a year, 
this extra, illegal ten cents a " piece " costs the Cuban people the neat 
little sum of at least $12,000,000 a year, or four dollars per capita. 

The drawings take place every ten days, besides a few loterias ex- 
traordinarias, with prizes several times larger, on the principal holi- 
days. They are conducted in the old treasury building down near the 
end of Calle Obispo. We reached there soon after seven of the morn- 
ing named on our tickets. A crowd of two hundred or more heavy- 
mouthed negroes, poorly clad mestizos, and ragged, emaciated old 
Chinamen for the most part, were huddled together in the shade at the 
edge of the porch-like room. A policeman — not the one whose scorn 
I had aroused — beckoned us to step inside and take one of the seats 
of honor along the wall, not, evidently, because we were Americans, 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 43 

but because our clothing was not patched or our collars missing. At 
the back a long table stretched the entire length of the room. A dozen 
solemn officials, resembling a jury or an election board, lolled in their 
seats behind it, a huge ledger, a sheath of papers, an ink-well and several 
pens and pencils before each of them. At the edge of the room, just 
clear of the standing crowd of hopeful riffraff, was a similar table 
on which another group of solemn-faced men were busily scribbling 
in as many large blank-books, with the sophisticated air of court or 
congressional reporters. Between the tables were two globes of open- 
work brass, one perhaps six feet in diameter, the other several times 
smaller. The larger was filled with balls the size of marbles, each 
engraved with a number; the smaller one contained several thousand 
others, representing varying sums of money. 

Almost at the moment we entered a gong sounded. Four muscular 
negroes rushed forth from behind the scenes and, grasping two handles 
projecting at the rear, turned the big globe over and over, its myriad of 
little balls rattling like a stage wind-storm. At the same time an in- 
dividual of as certain, if less decided, African ancestry, solemnly 
shuffled the contents of the smaller sphere in the same manner. Then 
the interrupted drawing began again. Four boys, averaging eight years 
of age, "stood in pairs at either globe. At intervals of about thirty sec- 
onds two of them pulled levers that released one marble from each 
sphere, and which long brass troughs or runways deposited in cut- 
glass bowls in front of the other two boys. The urchin on the big 
globe side snatched up his marble, called out a long number — in most 
cases running into the tens of thousands — and as his voice ceased, his 
companion opposite announced the amount of the prize. Then the 
two balls were spitted side by side on a sort of Chinese reckoning- 
board manipulated by another solemn-faced adult, who now and again 
corrected a misreading by the boy calling the numbers. 

For the hour we remained this monotonous formality went steadily 
on, as it does every ten days from seven in the morning until nearly 
noon, ceasing only when all the balls in the smaller sphere have been 
withdrawn. Each of these represents a prize, but as considerably 
more than a thousand of them are of one hundred dollars each — or a 
dollar a " piece " — the almost constant " con cien pesos " of the prize- 
boy grew wearisome in the extreme. The men at the reporters' table 
scribbled every number feverishly with their sputtering steel pens, 
but the " jury " at the back yielded to the soporific drone of childish 
voices and dozed half-open-eyed in their chairs — except when one of 



44 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the major prizes was announced. Then they sat up alertly at atten- 
tion, and inscribed one after another on their massive ledgers the num- 
ber on the ball which an official held before each of their noses in turn, 
while the patch-clad gathering outside the room shifted excitedly on 
their weary feet and scanned the " pieces " in their sweaty hands with 
varying expressions of disgust and disappointment. Now and then the 
boys changed places, but only one of them, of dull-brown complexion 
and already gifted with the shifty eye of the half-cast, performed his 
task to the general satisfaction. The others were frequently inter- 
rupted by a protest from one of the recorders, whereupon the number 
that had just been called was emphatically reread by an adult, amid 
much scratching of pens in the leather-bound ledgers. If the monotony 
of the scene was wearisome, its solemnity made it correspondingly 
amusing. An uninformed observer would probably have taken it for 
at least a presidential election. Rachel asserted that it reminded her 
of Alice in Wonderland, but as my education was neglected I cannot 
confirm this impression. What aroused my own wonder was the fact 
that some two score more-or-less-high officials of a national govern- 
ment should be engaged in so ridiculous a formality, and that a sov- 
ereign republic should indulge in the nefarious profession of the book- 
maker. But to every people its own customs. 

If I had fancied it the fault of my own ear that I had not caught 
all the numbers, the impression would have been corrected by the 
afternoon papers. All of them carried a column or more of protest 
against the " absurd inefficiency " of the boys who had served that 
morning; most of them made the complaint the chief subject of their 
editorial pages. The Casa de Beneficencia — an institution correspond- 
ing roughly to our orphan asylums — was solemnly warned that it must 
thereafter furnish more capable inmates to cantar las bolas (" sing the 
balls") on pain of losing the privilege entirely. Not only had the 
" uninstructed urchins " of that morning made mistakes in reading 
the numbers — a dastardly thing from the Cuban point of view — but 
had pronounced many of them in so slovenly a manner that " our special 
reporters were unable to supply our readers with correct information 
on a subject of prime importance to the entire republic." Beware that 
k never happened again ! It was easy to picture the poor overworked 
nuns of the asylum toiling far into the night to impress upon a multi- 
complexioned group of fatherless gamins the urgent necessity of learn- 
ing to read figures quickly and accurately, if they ever hoped to become 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 45 

normal, full-grown men and perhaps win the big prize some day them- 
selves. 

Winning tickets may be cashed at any official colectoria at any time 
within a year, but such delays are rare. Barely is the drawing ended 
when the venders, armed with the billctes of the next sorteo, hurry 
forth over their accustomed beats to pay the winners and establish a 
reputation not so much for promptitude as for the ability to offer lucky 
numbers. The capital prize, $100,000 in most cases, is perhaps won 
now and then by some favorite of fortune, instead of falling to the 
Government, collector of all unsold winners, though I have never 
personally known of such a stroke of luck during all my wanderings 
in lottery-infested lands. Smaller causes for momentary happiness 
are more frequent, for with 174 1 prizes, divisible into a hundred 
" pieces " each, it would be strange if a persistent player did not now 
and then " make a killing." But even these must be rare in comparison 
to the optimistic multitude that pursues the goddess Chance, for on 
the morning following a drawing the streets of Havana are everywhere 
littered with worthless billctes cast off by wrathy purchasers. Where- 
fore an incorrigible moralist has deduced a motto that may be worth 
passing on to future travelers in Cuba : 

" Buy a ' piece ' or two that you may know the sneer of Fortune, 
but don't get the habit." 

Three days before the wedding of my sister, mama, she and I went to the 
house of my future brother-in-law to put Alice's things in order. The novio 
was not there. He had discreetly withdrawn to a hotel and only came home 
now and then for a few moments to give orders to the servants. If he found 
us there he greeted us in the hall and did not enter the rooms except as we 
invited him. As there were no women in his family we had to occupy our- 
selves with all these matters. 

" Listen, my daughter," said mama, one night, after the novio had gone, " when 
to-morrow you take leave of your fiance do not pass beyond the line marked on 
the floor by the light of the hall lamp." My sister started to protest, " But, mama, 
what is there wrong in that?" " Nothing, daughter, but it is not proper. Do as 
I tell you." Alice, though slightly displeased with the order, always obeyed it 
thereafter. 

These two quotations from one of Cuba's latest novels give in a nut- 
shell the position of women in Cuba. Like all Latin-American coun- 
tries, especially of the tropics, it is essentially a man's country. One 
of the great surprises of Havana is the scarcity of women on the 
streets, even at times when they swarm with promenading men. The 



46 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Cuban believes as firmly as the old Spaniard that the woman's sphere 
is strictly behind the grill of the front window, and with few exceptions 
the women agree with him. The result is that her interest in life 
beyond her own household is virtually nil. The " Woman Suffrage 
Party of Cuba " recently issued a pompous manifesto, but it seems to 
have won about as much support on the island as would a missionary 
of the prohibition movement. In the words of the militants of the sex 
in Anglo-Saxon lands, " the Cuban woman has not yet reached emanci- 
pation." 

The clerks, even in shops that deal only in female apparel, are almost 
exclusively male. The offices that employ stenographers or assistants 
from the ranks of the fair sex are rare, and those usually recruit such 
help in the United States. Except on gala occasions, it is extremely 
seldom that a Cuban girl of the better class is seen in public, and even 
then only in company with a duenna or a male member of her immedi- 
ate family, and few married women consider it proper to appear unac- 
companied by their husbands, despite American example. As another 
Cuban writer has put it, " One of our greatest defects is the little or 
entire lack of genuine respect for women. Though we are outwardly 
extremely gallant in society and sticklers for the finer points of 
etiquette and courtesy, we almost always look upon a woman merely as 
a female and our first thought of at least a young and beautiful 
woman is to imagine all her hidden perfections. The instant a lady 
comes within sight of the average Cuban gathering all eyes are fixed 
upon her with a stare that in Anglo-Saxon countries would be more 
than impertinent, which pretends to be flattering, but which at bottom 
is truly insulting." He does not add that the women rather invite 
this attention and feel themselves slighted, their attractions unappreci- 
ated, if it is not given. Yet of open offenses against her modesty the 
Cuban lady is freer than on the streets of our own large cities. Even 
in restaurants and gatherings where those of the land never appear, an 
American woman is treated, except in the matter of staring, with 
genuine courtesy by all classes. 

The custom of living almost exclusively in the privacy of her own 
home has given the Cuban woman a tendency to spend the day in 
disreputable undress. Their hair dishevelled, their forms loosely en- 
veloped in a bata or in a slatternly petticoat and dressing-sack, usually 
torn and seldom clean, their toes thrust into slippers that slap at every 
step, they slouch about the house all the endless day. Unless there 
are guests they never dress for lunch, seldom for dinner, but don 



RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 47 

instead earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and an astonishing collection of 
finger rings, powdering their faces rather than washing them. During 
meals the favorite topics of conversation are food and digestion; if 
one of them has had any of the numerous minor ailments natural to a 
life of non-exertion, it is sure to be the subject of a cacophonous dis- 
cussion that lasts until the appearance of the inevitable toothpicks. 
Servants, with whom they associate with a familiarity unknown in 
Northern homes, are numerous, and leave little occupation for the 
mothers and daughters. The women never read, not even the news- 
papers, and their minds, poorly trained to begin with in the nun-taught 
" finishing schools," go to seed early, so that by late youth or early 
middle age their faces show the effects of a selfish, idle existence and 
a life of continual boredom. But lest I be accused of being over- 
critical, let me quote once more the native writer already introduced : 

In one of the interior habitations a piano sounded, beaten by a clumsy hand 
that repeated the same immature exercise without cessation. There was general 
discussion in the dining-room at all hours of the day, mingled with the shrieks of 
a parrot which swung on a perch suspended from the ceiling and the constant 
disputes of the children, who were snatching playthings from one another, heap- 
ing upon each other every class of verbal injury. The mother sewed and the 
older children tortured the piano during entire hours, or polished their nails with 
much care, rubbing them with several kinds of powders. When they had finished 
these occupations they slouched from one end of the house to the other, throwing 
themselves in turn upon all the divans or into the cushioned rocking-chairs and 
yawning with ennui. Their skirts fell from their belts, loosened by the languid 
and lazy gait. The mother did not want the girls to do anything in the house for 
fear they would spoil their hands and lose their chances of marriage. On the 
other hand, in the afternoon when the hour of visits drew near the time was 
always too short to distribute harmoniously the color on their cheeks and lips 
and to take off the little hair papers with which they artificially formed their 
waves or curls during the day. 

This continual hubbub seems to be customary to every household; 
all intercourse, be it orders to servants or admonitions to the insuffer- 
able children, being carried on by yelling. And there are no w r orse 
voices in the world than those of the Cuban women. Whether it is 
due to the climate or to the custom of reciting in chorus at school, they 
have a timbre that tortures the eardrums like the sharpening of a saw, 
and all day long they exercise them to the full capacity of their lungs. 
Under no circumstances is one of them given the floor alone, but the 
slightest morsel of gossip is threshed to bits in a free-for-all whirlwind 
of incomprehensible shrieking. 



48 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

On the other hand, the Cuban woman accepts many children willingly, 
and in accordance with her lights is an excellent wife and mother. 
Indeed, she is inclined to be over-affectionate, and given to serving her 
children where they should serve themselves, with a consequent lack 
of development in their characters. The boys in particular are 
" spoiled " by being granted every whim. The men are much less 
often at home than is the case with us, and seldom inclined to exert a 
masculine influence on their obstreperous sons. The result is a lack 
of self-control that makes itself felt through all Cuban manhood, a 
" touchiness," an inclination to stand on their dignity instead of yielding 
to the dictates of common sense. 

But if she is slouchy in the privacy of her own household, the Cuban 
woman is quite the opposite in public. The grande toilette is essential 
for the briefest appearance on the streets. American women assert 
that there is no definite style in feminine garb in Cuba, and I should 
not dream of questioning such authority, though to the mere mascu- 
line eye they always seem " dressed within an inch of their lives " when- 
ever they emerge into the sunlight. But it does not need even the 
intuition of the sometimes unfair sex to recognise that a life of physical 
indolence leaves their figures somewhat dumpy and ungraceful, seldom 
able to appear to advantage even in the best of gowns. Nor is it hard 
to detect a sense of discomfort in their unaccustomed full dress, which 
makes them eager to hurry home again to the negligee of bata and 
slippers. 

If the men monopolize other places of public gathering, the churches 
at least belong to the women. There are few places of worship in 
Havana, or in all Cuba, for that matter, that merit a visit for their own 
sake. Though most of them are overfilled with ambitious attempts 
at decoration, none of these is very successful. A single painting of 
worth here and there, an occasional side chapel, one or two carved 
choirstalls, are the only real artistic attractions. But several of them 
are well worth visiting for the side-lights they throw on Cuban cus- 
toms. As in Spain, every variety of diseased beggar squats in an ap- 
pealing attitude against the facades of the more fashionable religious 
edifices during the hours of general concourse. Luxurious automobiles, 
with negro chauffeurs in dazzling white liveries, sweep up to the foot 
of the broad stone steps in as continual procession as the narrow streets 
permit, but the passengers who alight are overwhelmingly of the gown- 
clad gender. Within, the perfume of the worshipers drowns out the 
incense. A glance across the sea of kneeling figures discloses astopish- 






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RANDOM SKETCHES OF HAVANA 49 

ingly few bare heads. The Cuban men, of course, are " good 
Catholics," too, but they are apt to confine their church attendance to 
special personal occasions. The church has no such influence in public 
affairs in Cuba as in many parts of the continent to the southward ; so 
little indeed, that public religious processions are forbidden by law, 
though sometimes permitted in practice. If the Jesuits are still a 
power to be reckoned with, so are los masones, and the mere proof of 
irreligion is no effective bar to governmental or commercial preferment. 

A deaf person would probably enjoy Havana far more than those of 
acute hearing. I have often wondered why nature did not provide us 
with earlids as well as eyelids. A mere oversight, no doubt, that would 
not have been made had the Cuban capital existed when the first models 
of the human being were submitted. Havana may not hold the noise 
championship of the world, but at least little old New York is silent 
by comparison. Unmuffled automobiles beyond computation, tram- 
cars that seem far more interested in producing clamor than speed, 
bellowing venders of everything vendible, are but the background of an 
unbroken uproar that permeates to every nook and cranny of the city. 
Honest hotel-keepers tell you frankly that they can offer every comfort 
except quiet. Even in church you hear little but the tumult outside, 
broken only at rare intervals by the droning voice of the preacher. It 
is not simply the day-time uproar of business hours ; it increases 
steadily from nightfall until dawn. In olden days the sereno, with his 
dark lantern, his pike, pistol, bunch of keys, whistle, and rope, wandered 
through the streets calling out the time and the state of the weather 
every half-hour. His efforts would be wasted nowadays. The long- 
seasoned inhabitants seem to have grown callous to the constant turbu- 
lence ; I have yet to meet a newcomer who confesses to an unbroken 
hour of sleep. If you move out to one of the pensions of Vedado, the 
household itself will keep you constantly reminded that you are still 
in Havana. The Cubans themselves seem to thrive on noise. If they 
are so unfortunate as to be denied their beloved din, they lose no time 
in producing another from their own throats. After a week in Havana 
we took a ferry across the harbor and strolled along the plain behind 
Cabana Fortress. For some time we were aware of an indefinable 
sensation of strangeness amounting almost to discomfort. We had 
covered a mile or so more before we suddenly discovered that it was 
due to the unaccustomed silence. 



CHAPTER III 

CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 

STEAMERS to Havana land the traveler within a block or two 
of the central railway station, so that, if the capital has no fas- 
cination for him, there lies at hand more than four thousand 
kilometers of track to put him in touch with almost any point of the 
island. The most feasible way of visiting the interior of Cuba is by 
rail, unless one has the time and inclination to do it on foot. Auto- 
mobiles are all very well in the vicinity of Havana, but the Cuban, 
like most Latin-Americans, is distinctly not a road builder, and there are 
long stretches of the island where only the single-footing native horses 
can unquestionably make their way. There is occasional steamer 
service along the coasts, and with few exceptions the important towns 
are on the sea, but even to visit all these is scarcely seeing Cuba. 

The railroads are several in number and as well equipped as our 
second-class lines. One ventures as far west as Guane ; there is a rather 
thorough network in the region nearest the capital ; or the traveler 
may enter his sleeping-car at Havana and, if nothing happens, land at 
Santiago in the distant " Oriente " some thirty-six hours later. Un- 
fortunately something usually happens. The ferry from Key West 
brings not only passengers, but whole freight trains, and among the 
curious sights of Cuba are box-cars from as far off as the State of 
Washington basking in the tropical sunshine or the shade of royal 
palms hundreds of miles east of Havana. First-class fares are higher 
than those of our own land, but some eighty per cent, of the traveling 
public content themselves with the hard wooden benches of what, in 
spite of the absence of an intervening second, are quite properly called 
third-class. Freight rates are said to average five times those in the 
United States. Women of the better class are almost as rarely seen 
on the trains as on the streets of Havana, with the result that the few 
first-class coaches are sometimes exclusively filled with men, and 
all cars are smoking-cars. 

There are sights and incidents of interests even in the more com- 
monplace first-class coaches. In the November season, when the mills 

SO 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 51 

of the island begin their grinding, they carry many Americans on their 
way back to the sugar estates, most of them of the highly skilled labor 
class in speech and point of view. Now and again a well-dressed na- 
tive shares his seat with his fighting-cock, dropping about the bird's 
feet the sack in which the rules of the company require it to be car- 
ried and occasionally giving it a drink at the passengers' water-tank. 
At frequent intervals the gamester shrilly challenges the world at large ; 
travelers by Pullman have been known to spend sleepless nights be- 
cause of a crowing rooster in the next berth. Train-guards in the uni- 
form of American soldiers, an " O. P." on their collars — this being the 
abbreviation of the Spanish words for " Public Order " — armed with 
rifle, revolver, and a long sword with an eagle's-head hilt in the beak 
of which is held the retaining strap, strut back and forth through the 
train, usually in pairs. Most of them are well-behaved youths, though 
the wide-spread corps on which the government largely depends t(? 
overawe its revolutionarily inclined political opponents is not wholly 
free from rowdies. The trainboy and the brakemen have the same 
gift of incomprehensible language as our own, and only a difference in 
uniform serves in most cases to distinguish the name of the next sta- 
tion from that of some native fruit offered for sale. The wares of 
the Cuban train vender are more varied than in our own circumspect 
land. Not only can he furnish the bottles that cheer, in any quantity 
and degree of strength, but also lottery tickets, cooked food, and 
oranges deftly pared like an apple, in the native fashion. There is 
probably no fruit on earth which varies so much in its form of con- 
sumption in different countries as the orange. 

But it is in third-class that one may find a veritable riot of color. 
Types and complexions of every degree known to the human race 
crowd the less comfortable coaches. There are leather-faced Span- 
iards returning for the zafra, fresh, boyish faces of similar origin and 
destination, Basques in their boinas and corduroy clothes, untamed- 
looking Haitians sputtering their uncouth tongue, more merry negroes 
from! the British West Indies, Chinamen and half -Chinamen, Cuban 
countrymen in a combination shirt and blouse called a chamarreta, men 
carrying roosters under their arms, men with hunting dogs, negro girls 
in purple and other screaming colors, including furs dyed in tints 
unknown to the animal world, and a scattering of Oriental and purely 
Caucasian features from the opposite ends of the earth. Perhaps one 
third of the throng would come under the classification of " niggers " 
in our " Jim Crow " States ; Southerners would be, and sometimes 



52 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

are, horrified to see the blackest and the whitest race sharing the same 
seat and even engaged, perhaps, in animated conversation. In a 
corner sits, more likely than not, an enormous negro woman with a 
big black cigar protruding from her massive lips at an aggressive 
angle and a brood of piccaninnies peering out from beneath her vol- 
uminous skirts like chicks sheltered from rain by the mother hen. All 
the gamut of sophistication is there, from the guajiro, or Cuban peas- 
ant, of forty who is taking his first train-ride and is waiting in secret 
terror for the first station, that he may drop off and walk home, to 
others as blase as the entirely respectable, cosmopolitan, uninteresting 
travelers in the chair-car and Pullmans behind. 

There are express trains in Cuba, those that make the long journey 
between the two principal cities sometimes so heavy with their half 
dozen third, their one or two first-class, their Pullman, baggage, ex- 
press, and mail-cars, that it is small wonder the single engine can keep 
abreast of the time-table even when washouts or slippery, grass-brown 
rails do not add to its troubles. Section-gangs are conspicuous by 
their scarcity, and those who contract to keep the tracks clear of vege- 
tation by a monthly sprinkling of chemicals do not always accomplish 
their task. But there is nothing more comfortable than loafing along 
in the wicker chairs to be found in one uncrowded end of the first- 
class coach, without extra charge, with the immense car-windows wide 
open, far enough back to miss the inevitable cinders, through the per- 
petual, palm-tree-studded summer of the tropics. Even the expresses 
are, perhaps unintentionally, sight-seeing trains, though they are fre- 
quently more or less exasperating to the hurried business man. But, 
then, one has no right to be a hurried business man in the West In- 
dies. 

The slower majority of trains dally at each station, according to 
its size, just about long enough to " give the town the once over " ; 
or, if it is large enough to be worth a longer visit, one is almost certain 
to catch the next train if he sets out for the station as soon as it arrives. 
The scene at a Cuban railway station is always interesting. Except 
in the largest towns, most of the population comes down to see the train 
go through, so that the platform is crowded half an hour before it is 
due, which usually means an hour or two before it actually arrives. 
The new-comer is apt to conclude that he has little chance of getting a 
seat, but he soon learns by experience that few of these platform 
loungers are actual travelers. The average station crowd is distinctly 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 53 

African in complexion, though perhaps a majority show a greater 
or less percentage of European ancestry. Pompous black dames in 
gaudy dresses, newly ironed and starched, with big brass ear-rings and 
huge combs in their frizzled tresses, their fingers heavy with a dozen 
cheap rings, stand coyly smoking their long black cigars. A man with 
his best rooster under one arm and his best girl on the other stalks 
haughtily to and fro among his rivals and admirers. An excited negro 
with a gamecock in one hand waves it wildly in the air as he argues, 
or tucks it under an armpit while he wrestles with his baggage. A 
colored girl in robin's-egg blue madly powders her nose in a corner, 
using a pocket mirror of the size of a cabinet photograph. Guajiros 
in chamarretas with stiffly starched white bosoms which give them a 
resemblance to dress shirts that have not been tucked into the trousers, 
a big knife in a sheath half showing below them, the trousers them- 
selves white, or faintly pink, or cream-colored, even of gay plaids in 
the more African cases, their heads covered with immense straw hats 
and their feet with noiseless alpargatas, gaze about them with the won- 
dering air of peasants the world over. Rural guards of the " O. P." 
strut hither and yon, making a great show of force both in numbers 
and weapons. Children of all ages add their falsetto to the constant 
hubbub of chatter. Here and there a worn-out old Chinaman wanders 
about offering dukes for sale. A negro crone engaged in that unsavory 
occupation technically known as " shooting snipes " picks up an aban- 
doned cigar or cigarette butt here and there, lighting it from the rem- 
nant of another and dropping that into a pocket. The first-class wait- 
ing-room is crowded, but the departure of the train will prove that most 
of the occupants have come merely to show off their finery or examine 
that of their neighbors. A white-haired old negro man wheels back and 
forth in the bit of space left to him a white baby resplendent with pink 
ribbons. When the train creaks in at last, would-be baggage carriers 
swarm into the coaches or about departing travelers like aggressive 
mosquitoes. The racial disorderliness of Latin-Americans, and their 
abhorrence of carrying their own bags, make this latter nuisance uni- 
versal throughout the length and breadth of the island. It is of no 
use for the American traveler to assert his own ability to bear his 
burdens ; no one believes him, and they are sure to be snatched out of 
his hands by some officious ragamuffin before he can escape from the 
maelstrom. In some stations a massive, self-assertive negro woman 
" contracts " to see all hand baggage on or off the trains, keeping all 



54 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the rabble of ragged men and boys, some of them pure white, in her em- 
ploy and collecting the gratuities herself in a final promenade through 
the cars. 

Sometimes the train stops for a station meal, the mere buffet service 
on board being uncertain and insufficient. Then it is every one for 
himself and hunger catch the hindmost, for one has small chance of 
attracting the attention of the overworked concessionary if the heaping 
platters with which the common table is crowded are empty before he 
can lay hand upon them. Then he must trust to the old Chinamen 
who patiently stand all day along the edge of the platform, or even 
well into the night, slinking off into the darkness with their lantern- 
lighted boxes of sweets and biscuits only when the last train has rumbled 
away to the east or west. 

We were invited to spend a Sunday at a big tobacco finca in the 
heart of the far-famed Vuelta Abajo district in Cuba's westernmost 
province. With the exception of Guanajay the few towns between 
Havana and Pinar del Rio, capital of the province of the same name, 
have little importance. The passing impression is of rich red mud, 
a glaring sunshine, and a wide difference between the rather foppish, 
over-dressed Havanese and the uncouth countrymen in their bohios, 
huts of palm-leaves and thatch which probably still bear a close re- 
semblance to those in which Columbus found the aborigines living. 
Then there are of course the royal palms, which grow everywhere in 
Cuba in even greater profusion than in Brazil. The roads are bord- 
ered with them, the fields are striped with their silvery white trunks, 
their majestic fronds give the finishing touch to every landscape. 

Pinar del Rio itself has the same baking-hot, glaring, dusty aspect 
of almost all towns of the interior in the dry season, the same curious 
contrasts of snorting automobiles and guajiros peddling their milk on 
horseback, the cans in burlap or leaf-woven saddlebags beneath their 
crossed or dangling legs. Beyond, the mix to wanders along at a jog 
trot, now and then stopping for a drink or to urge a belligerent bull 
off the track. Here a peasant picks his way carefully down the car 
steps, carrying by a string looped over one calloused finger two lordly 
peacocks craning their plumed heads from the tight palm-leaf wrap- 
pings in which their bodies are concealed ; there a family climbs aboard 
with a black nursegirl of ten, whose saucer eyes as she points and ex- 
claims at what no doubt seems to her the swiftly fleeing landscape 
show that she has never before been on a train. Tobacco is grown 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 55 

in scattered sections all over Cuba, but it is most at home in the gently 
rolling heart of this western province. Being Sunday, there was little 
work going on in the fields, but when we passed this way two days 
later we found them everywhere being plowed with oxen, birds fol- 
lowing close on the heels of the plowmen to pick up the bugs and 
worms, women and children as well as men transplanting the bed- 
grown seedlings of the size of radish tops. Time was when the nar- 
cotic weed had all this region to itself, but the lordly sugar-cane is 
steadily encroaching upon it now, daring to grow in the very shadow 
of the old, brown, leaf-built tobacco barns. 

Don Jacinto himself did not meet us at the train, but his giant of a 
son greeted us with an elaborate Castilian courtesy which seemed cu- 
riously out of keeping with his fluent English, interlarded with Ameri- 
can college slang. How he managed to cramp himself into the driving 
seat of the bespattered Ford was as much of a mystery as the apparent 
ease with which it skimmed along the bottomless Cuban country road 
or swam the bridgeless river. I noted that it bore no license tag and, 
perhaps unwisely, expressed my surprise aloud, for Don Jacinto's son 
smiled quizzically and for some time made no other answer. Then 
he explained, " Those of us who are old residents and large property 
holders in our communities do not bother to take out licenses ; besides, 
they are only five dollars here in the country, so it is hardly worth 
the trouble." 

Our host, a lordly-mannered old Spaniard who had come to Cuba 
in his early youth, received us on the broad, breeze-swept veranda of 
his dwelling. It was a typical Spanish country house of the tropics, 
low and of a single story, yet capacious, rambling back through a 
large, wide-open parlor, a dining-room almost as extensive, and a 
cobbled patio to a smoke-blackened kitchen and the quarters of the 
dozen black domestics who were tending the pots or responding with 
alacrity to the slightest hint of a summons from Don Jacinto or his 
equally imperious son. The living rooms flanked the two larger cham- 
bers, and were as tightly closed as the latter were wide open. The 
guest room opening directly off the parlor contained all the conveni- 
ences that American influence has brought to Cuba, without losing 
a bit of its Castilian architecture. There were of course neither 
carpets nor rugs in the house, bare wooden floors being not only cooler, 
but less inviting to the inevitable insects of the tropics. A score of 
cane rocking-chairs, the same round rattan which formed the rockers 
curving upward and backward to give the chair its arms, and a bare 



56 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

table, constituted the entire furniture of the parlor. On the unpapered 
wooden walls hung two framed portraits and a large calendar. Boxes 
of cigars lay invitingly open in all the three rooms we entered and 
another decorated the table on the cement-paved veranda. 

This last was the principal rendezvous of the household-. There 
a peon dumped a small cartload of mail, made up largely of technical 
periodicals ; there the servants and the overseers came to receive or- 
ders. The demeanor of the inferiors before their masters was in per- 
fect keeping with the patriarchal atmosphere of the entire iinca. 
Thus, one easily imagined, plantation owners commanded and servants 
unquestionably obeyed in the days of slavery. There was a certain 
comradeship, one might almost say democracy, between the two, or 
the several, social grades, but it was not one which carried with it the 
slightest suggestion of familiarity on either side. 

Luncheon was a ceremonious affair. Rachel, .being the only lady 
present, was given the head of the table, with Don Jacinto on her 
right. In theory the ladies of the household were indisposed, but it 
was probably only the presence of strangers, particularly a male 
stranger, which kept them from appearing, if only in bata and curl- 
papers. Below our host and myself, on opposite sides, the company 
was ranged down the table in careful gradations of social standing, 
empty chairs separating those who were too widely different in rank 
to touch elbows. Thus there was a vacant chair between the son of 
the house and the head overseer and, farther down, two of them 
separated the company chemist from a sort of field boss. Conversa- 
tion was similarly graded. The chief overseer did not hesitate to 
put in a word or even tell an anecdote whenever guests, father or son 
were not speaking; the chemist now and then ventured a remark of 
his own, but the field boss ate in utter silence except when some ques- 
tion from the top of the table brought from him a respectful mono- 
syllablic reply. Of the food served on one mammoth platter after 
another I will say nothing beyond remarking that two thirds of it was 
meat, all of it well cooked, and the quantity so great that the whole as- 
sembled company scarcely made a noticeable impression upon it. Over 
the table hung an immense cloth fan like the punkahs of India, oper- 
ated in the same manner by a boy incessantly pulling at a rope over 
a pulley in the far end of the room. Its purpose, however, was dif- 
ferent, as was indicated by its name, espanto-moscas (scare-flies), for 
Cuba's unfailing breeze would have sufficed to keep the air cool ; 
but when the wallah suddenly abandoned his task with the appearance 




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Matanzas, with drying sisal fiber in the foreground 




The Central Plaza of Cienfuegos 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 57 

of the coffee the flies quickly settled down upon us in a veritable cloud. 
It may be that the tobacco fields attract them, for they are ordinarily 
far less troublesome in the West Indies than during our own sum- 
mers. 

November being merely planting time the finca presented a bare ap- 
pearance compared with what it would be in March, when the tall 
tobacco plants wave everywhere in the breeze. Behind the house was 
a dovecote which suggested some immense New York apartment house, 
so many were its several-storied compartments. A handful of corn 
brought a fluttering gray and white cloud which almost obscured the 
sun. Pigeons and chickens are kept in large numbers in the tobacco 
fields to follow the plows and eat the insects which would otherwise 
destroy the seeds and the young plants. The supply barn was the 
chief center of industry at this season, with its plows and watering- 
pots marshaled in long rows, its tons of fertilizer in sacks, its cords of 
baled cheese-cloth, its bags of tobacco seed, so microscopic in size that 
it takes four hundred thousand of them to weigh an ounce. The seed- 
beds were at some distance. There the seed is sowed like wheat and 
the plants grow as compactly as grass on a lawn until they are about 
twenty days old, when they are transferred to the larger fields and 
given room to expand almost to man's height. For acres upon acres 
the rolling landscape stood forested with poles on which the cheese- 
cloth would be hung a few weeks later, the vista recalling the hop-fields 
of Bavaria in the spring-time. The idea of growing " wrapper " to- 
bacco in the shade, in order to keep the leaves silky and of uniform 
color, is said to have originated in the United States and to have made 
its way but slowly in Cuba, where planters long considered a maximum 
of sunshine requisite to the best quality. To-day it is in general vogue 
throughout the island. 

We whiled away the afternoon on the breezy veranda, where the more 
important employees of the finca and men from the neighboring town 
came to discuss the crop, to say nothing of helping themselves to the 
cigars which lay everywhere within easy reach. There was some- 
thing delightfully Old World about the simplicity of this patriarchal 
family life, perhaps because it had scarcely a hint of Americanism 
and its concomitant commercial bustle. Among the visitors was a 
lottery vender on horseback, who sold Don Jacinto and his son their 
customary half dozen " strips," these being sheets of twenty or thirty 
" pieces " of the same number. The company doctor parted with 
thirty dollars for a " whole ticket." Each had his own little scheme 



58 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

for choosing the numbers, one refusing those in which the same figure 
was repeated, another insisting that the total of the added figures 
should be divisible by three, some depending on dreams or fantastic 
combinations of figures they had seen or heard spoken during the day. 
The workmen on the estate, as on every one in Cuba, were inveterate 
gamblers. Not only did they buy as many " pieces " each week as 
they could pay for, but they all " played terminals," that is, formed 
pools which were won by the man guessing correctly the last two 
numbers of the week's winning ticket. 

We visited tobacco estates in other parts of Cuba and saw all the 
process except the cutting and curing before we left the island. At 
Zaza del Medio, for instance, whole carloads of small plants are 
handled during November. They are very hardy, living for three or 
four days after being pulled up by the roots from the seed-beds. 
Strewn out on the station platform in little leaf-tied bundles, they were 
counted bunch by bunch and tossed into plaited straw saddlebags, to 
be transported by pack-animals to fields sometimes more than a day's 
journey distant. Surrounded on all sides by horizonless seas of sugar- 
cane, the Zaza del Medio region is conspicuous twenty miles off by its 
tobacco color, not of course of the plants, but of the rich brown of 
plowed fields and the aged thatch-built tobacco barns. We rode that 
way one day, our horses floundering through mammoth mud-holes, 
stepping gingerly through masses of thorny aroma, and fording saddle- 
deep the Zaza River. Here the small planter system, as distinctive 
from the big administrative estates of Vuelto Abajo, is in vogue. 
W r e found lazy oxen swinging along as if in time to a wedding march, 
dragging behind them crude wooden plows protected by an iron point. 
A boy followed each of them, dropping a withered small plant at 
regular intervals, a man, or sometimes a woman, setting them up 
behind him. Immense barns made of a pole frame-work covered en- 
tirely with brown and shaggy guinea-grass bulked forth against the 
palm-tree-punctuated horizon. The similarly constructed houses of the 
planters were minute by comparison. Here, they told us, tobacco 
grows only waist high, in contrast to the six feet it sometimes attains in 
Pinar del Rio province. In February or March the plants are cut off 
at the base and strung on the poles which lie heaped in immense piles, 
and hung for two months in the airy barns. Then they are wrapped 
in yagna and carried back to the railroad on pack-animals. Yagua, by 
the way, which is constantly intruding upon any description of the 
West Indies, where it is put to a great variety of uses, is the base of 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 59 

the leaf of the royal palm, the lower one of which drops off regularly 
about once a month. It is pliable and durable as leather, which it re- 
sembles in appearance, though it is several times thicker, and a single 
leaf supplies a strip a yard long and half as wide. 

Rivals, especially Jamaica, assert that the famous tobacco vegas of 
Cuba are worn out and that Cuban tobacco is now living on its reputa- 
tion. The statement is scarcely borne out by the aroma of the cigars 
sold by every shop-keeper on the island, though to tell the truth they 
do not equal the " Habana " as we know it in the North. This is pos- 
sibly due to the humidity of the climate. The new-comer is surprised 
to find how cavalierly the Cuban treats his cigars, or tobacos, as he calls 
them. Even though he squanders dos reales each for them he thrusts 
a handful loosely into an outside coat pocket, as if they were so many 
strips of wood. For they are so damp and pliable in the humid Cuban 
atmosphere that they will endure an astonishing amount of mistreat- 
ment without coming to grief. Contrary to the assertions of Dame 
Rumor, Cubans do not smoke cigarettes only; perhaps the majority, of 
the countrymen at least, confine themselves to cigars. 

There are cigar-makers in every town of Cuba, though Havana 
almost monopolizes the export trade. How long some of the famous 
factories have been in existence was suggested to us by a grindstone 
in the patio of the one opposite the new national palace. There the 
workmen come to whet their knives each morning, and they had worn 
their way completely through the enormous grindstone in several places 
around the edge. The methods in Havana cigar factories are of course 
similar to those of Cayo Hueso, as Cuba calls our southernmost city. 
In one of them we were shown cigars which " wholesale " at fifteen 
hundred dollars a thousand, though I got no opportunity of judging 
whether or not they were worth it, either in tobacco or ostentation. 
The stems of the tobacco leaves are shipped to New York and made 
into snuff. An average wage for the cigar makers was said to be five 
dollars a day. They each paid that many cents a week to the factory 
reader, who entertains the male workmen with the daily newspapers, 
and the women, by their own choice of course, with the most sentimental 
of novels. Girls will be girls the world over. 

The dreadful habit of using tobacco has progressed since the day 
when Columbus discovered the aborigines of the great island of Cuba- 
nacan smoking, not Habana cigars, but by using a forked reed two ends 
of which they put in their nostrils and the other in a heap of burning 
tobacco leaves. 



60 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Neither space nor the reader's patience would hold out if I attempted 
to do more than " hit the high spots " of our two months of journeying 
to and fro in Cuba. There is room for a year of constant sight-seeing 
and material for a fat volume in the largest of the West Indies, though 
to tell the truth there is a certain sameness of climate, landscape, town, 
and character which might make that long a stay monotonous despite 
the glories of at least the first two of these. While he lacks something 
of that open frankness of intercourse which we are wont to think 
reaches its height in our own free and easy land, and the exclusiveness 
of his family life puts him at a disadvantage as an entertainer of guests, 
the Cuban himself, particularly outside the larger cities, is not inhospi- 
table. But his welcome of visitors from the North is overshadowed 
by the unbounded hospitality of the American residents of Cuba, 
whether on the great sugar estates, the fruit farms, in the scattered 
enterprises of varied nature in all corners of the island, or in the many 
cities that have become their homes. Merely to enumerate the un- 
expected welcomes we met with from our own people in all parts of the 
island would be to fill many pages. 

The cities, on the whole, are the least pleasant of Cuba's attractions. 
Their hotels, and those places with which the traveler is most likely to 
come in contact, are largely given over to the insular sport of tourist- 
baiting even before midwinter brings its plethora of cold-fleeing, race- 
track-following, or prohibition-abhorring visitors from the North. 
Havana, I take it, would be the last place in the world for the lover of 
the simplicities of life, as for the man of modest income, in those winter 
months when its hotels turn away whole droves of would-be guests and 
its already exorbitant prices climb far out of sight from the topmost 
rung of the ladder of reason. Incidentally Cuba is in the throes of 
what might be called a " sugar vs. tourists " controversy. Its merchants 
would like to draw as many visitors as possible, but even its tourist 
bureau sees itself obliged to "soft pedal" its appeals. If still more 
visitors come, where is the island to house them? Time was when her 
more expensive hotels, especially of Havana, stood well nigh empty 
through the summer and welcomed the first refugees from Jack Frost 
with open arms, or at least doors. It is not so to-day. Sugar planters 
from the interior, who would once have grumbled at paying a dollar 
for a night's lodging in a back street fonda, now demand the most 
luxurious suites facing the plaza and the Prado, nay, even house their 
families in them for months at a time, to the dismay of foreign visitors. 
Stevedores who were once overjoyed to earn two dollars a day sneer 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 61 

at the fabulous wages offered them now, knowing that a bit of specula- 
tion in sugar stocks will bring them many times the amount to be had by 
physical exertion. The advice most apropos to the modern visitor to 
Cuba whose tastes are simple and whose fortune is limited would be, 
perhaps, to come early and avoid the cities. 

We found Pinar del Rio town, for instance, far less beguiling than 
a journey we made from it over the mountain to the Matahambre mines. 
A peon met us with native horses where the hired Ford confessed its 
inability to advance farther. Along the narrow trail the vegetation was 
dense and tropical. Royal palms waved high along the borders of the 
small streams; red-trunked macicos, yagrumas with their curious up- 
turned leaves showing their white backs, broke the almost monotony 
of the greenery. Here and there we passed a brown grass hut which 
seemed to have grown up of itself, a little patch of malanga, boniato, 
or yuca, the chief native tubers, about it, a dark woman paddling her 
wash against the trunk of a palm-tree on the edge of a water-hole, 
several babies in single white garments or their own little black skins 
scurrying away into the underbrush as we rode down upon them. A 
few horsemen passed us, and a pack-train or two ; but only one woman 
among the score or more we met was mounted. She was a jet-black 
lady in a bedraggled skirt and a man's straw hat, who teetered perilously 
on her uncomfortable side-saddle, yet who gazed scornfully down her 
shaded nose at Rachel, riding far more easily astride. Finally, when the 
sun was high and the vegetation scrubby and shadeless, and we had 
climbed laboriously up several steep, bare hillsides only to slide down 
again into another hollow, a cleft in the hills gave us a sudden panorama 
of the sea, and almost sheer below us lay spread out the mining town. 
The setting was barren, as is that of most mines, though five years 
before it had been covered with a pine forest, until a cyclone came to 
sweep it wholly away and leave only here and there a dead, branchless 
trunk in a reddish soil that gave every outer indication of being sterile. 
A network of red trails linked together the offices, the shafts and the 
reduction plant, the red-roofed houses of the American employees, and 
the thatched huts of the mine workers. 

Mining is not one of Cuba's chief assets, but this particular spot 
is producing a high-grade copper. Ore was discovered here by a deer 
hunter wandering through the forest of pines, but before he could 
make use of his knowledge the region was " denounced " by another 
Cuban and still belongs to his family, though there is some bitter-worded 
doubt as to which branch of it. It goes without saying that the manager. 



62 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

is an energetic young American. The laborers are chiefly Spaniards, 
for the Cubans are too superstitious to long endure working under- 
ground. The company builds its own roads, and has installed a tele- 
graph and post-office without government aid, yet it pays full rates 
on its telegrams or letters. We went far down the shaft into the 
damp blackness of the eighth and tenth levels, hundreds of feet below 
the surface, following the galleries and " stopes " to where the workmen 
were piling the bluish rock into the little iron hand-cars, the dull echoing 
thud of the dynamiting on some other level sending a shudder through 
the mountain. All night long the mine worked tirelessly on, the sus- 
pended ore-cars swinging down their six-mile cables across the gorge 
to the loading bins on the edge of the sea. 

We followed them in a Ford next morning, from the treeless uplands 
down through an oak-grown strip where half -wild hogs fatten them- 
selves, unwisely, for the plumper of them are sure to grace native 
boards during the fiesta of Noche Buena, then along a strip of palms to 
the Atlantic. A launch scudded down the coast with us to Esperanza, 
a long range of mountains, rounded in form, gashed with red wounds 
here and there, looking lofty only because they were so near at hand, 
seeming to keep pace with us as if bent on shutting us out of the level 
country behind them. After luncheon in the " best hotel," with a hen 
under my chair and a pig under Rachel's, we Forded to Viiiales, the 
road running for miles under the very lee of a sheer mountain wall, 
trees, especially of the palm variety, rising everywhere out of the 
crevices of the soft white rock and seeming to keep their foothold by 
clutching the wall above with their upper branches. Caves with 
elaborate stalactite and stalagmite formations gaped beneath them, until 
we rounded the spur and passed through a sort of mountain portal into 
the familiar, rolling, dense-grown interior again. 

We returned to .Pinar del Rio by guagua, a four-seated mail and 
passenger auto bus such as ply in many sections of rural Cuba. Its 
driver was as wild as his brethren of Havana, and the contrivance 
leaped along over the bad roads like a frolicsome goat. Fortunately the 
usual crowd had missed their ride that morning and we could stretch 
our legs at ease. Only a leathery old lady who dickered for a reduction 
in fare, two or three gnajiros in their best starched chamarrctas, a 
villager's shoes which were to be resoled, and two turkeys in palm-leaf 
cornucopias made up the passenger list. The shrill whistle in place 
of a horn warned dawdling countrymen to beware, for our chauffeur 
had scant respect for his fellow-mortals. 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 63 

Of the several towns which the traveler in Cuba is more or less sure 
to visit the first is usually Matanzas, both because it is the first place 
of any importance on the way eastward and because it boasts two 
natural phenomena that have been widely reported. The town itself, 
wrapped around the head of a deeply indented bay, has nothing that 
may not be found in a dozen other provincial towns, — unpaved streets 
reeking with mud or dust, according to the weather, a cement-floored 
central plaza gay with tropical vegetation and flanked by portalcs, or 
massive arcades, and constant vistas of the more formal hours of family 
life through the street-toeing window grilles. The pursuit of tourists 
is among its favorite sports, and not only are the prices and accommo- 
dations of hotels infinitely more attractive in the mouths of their run- 
ners at the station than at their desks, but the entire town seems to be 
banded together in a conspiracy to force foreign visitors to hire auto- 
mobiles. At least we were forced to learn by experience rather than 
by inquiry that the street-cars carry one two thirds of the way to either 
of the " sights " for which the place is noted, or that one can stroll 
the entire distance from the central plaza in half an hour. 

The Yumuri valley is, to be sure, well worth seeing. From the her- 
mitage of Montserrat, erected by the Catalans of the island on a slope 
above the town, the basin-shaped vale has a serene beauty, particularly 
at sunrise or toward sunset, which draws at least a murmur of pleasure 
from the beholder. Royal palms, singly and in clumps, dot the whole 
expanse of plain with their green plumes and silvery trunks and climb 
the slopes of the encircling hills, which lie like careless grass-grown 
heaps of cracked stone along the horizon. Even by day the silence is 
broken only by the distant shouts of a peasant or two struggling with 
their oxen and plows ; the occasional lowing of cattle floats past on the 
stronger breeze of evening. The Cubans rank this as their most en- 
trancing landscape, but I have seen as pretty views from the abandoned 
farms of Connecticut. For one thing the colors are not variegated 
enough in this seasonless land to give such scenes the beauty lent by 
changing leaves, though much else is made up for by the majesty of 
the royal palms. 

A gentler climb at the other end of town, between broad fields of 
rope-producing cactus, brings one to a cheap wooden house which might 
pass unnoticed but for the incongruous rumble of an electric dynamo 
within it. In sight of the commonplace landscape it is easy to believe 
the story that the caves of Bellamar remained for centuries unknown 
until a Chinese coolie extracting limestone for a near-by kiln discovered 



64 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

them by losing his crowbar through a hole he had poked in the earth. 
To-day they are exploited by the rope-making company which owns 
the surrounding fields. The main portion of the huge limestone cavern 
has been fitted with electric lights, which of themselves destroy half 
the romance of the subterranean chambers ; the temperature is that 
of a Turkish bath, and the stereotyped chatter of the guide grows 
worse than tiresome. But it would be a pity to let these minor draw- 
backs repel the traveler from visiting Cuba's weirdest scene. The cave 
contains more than thirty chambers or halls, the chief of which is the 
" Gothic Temple," two hundred and fifty by eighty feet in extent, its 
lofty roof upheld by massive white columns. There are immense 
natural bath-tubs, forming waterfalls, fantastic grottoes and nature- 
sculptured figures of all shapes and sizes along the undulating central 
passageway that stretches far away into the unlighted earth. Mounds 
that look like snow-banks, towering walls that seem shimmering cur- 
tains, white glistening slopes down which one might easily fancy oneself 
tobogganing, so closely do they resemble our Northern hillsides in 
mid-winter, resound with the cackling voice of the irrepressible guide. 
Of stalagmites and stalactites of every possible size there is no end, some 
of them slowly joining together to form others of those mighty columns 
which seem to bear aloft the outer earth. The caves are admirably 
fitted, except in temperature, to serve as setting for the more fantastic 
of Wagner operas. 

If the train is not yet due, it is worth while to visit the rope factory 
near the station. As they reach full size the lower leaves of the hcne- 
quen plants are cut off one by one and carried to the crushing-house 
on a knoll behind the main establishment. Here they are passed be- 
tween grooved rollers, the green sap and pulp falling away and leaving 
bunches of greenish fibers like coarser corn-silk, which shoot down 
across a little valley on cables to the drying-field. Looped over long 
rows of poles, they remain here for several days, until the sun has 
dried and bleached them to the color of new rope. Massive machines 
tended by women and men weave the fibers together in cords of hun- 
dreds of yards long and of the diameter of binding-twine ; similar ma- 
chines twist three of these into the resemblance of clothes-lines, which 
in their turn are woven together three by three, the process being 
repeated until great coils of ship's hawsers far larger than the hand 
can encircle emerge at the far end of the room ready for shipment. 

From Matanzas eastward fruit and garden plots, and the more in- 
tensive forms of cultivation, die out and the landscape becomes almost 




A principal street of Santa Clara 




The Central Plaza of Santa Clara 





u 

o 

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c 
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CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 65 

unbroken expanses of sugar-cane. The soil is more apt than not to 
be reddish. Automobiles disappear ; in their place are many men on 
horseback and massive high-wheeled carts drawn by oxen. On the 
whole the country is flat, uninteresting, with endless stretches of cane- 
fields, palm-trees, and nothing else. A branch line will carry one to 
Cardenas, but it is hot, dusty, and dry, as parched as the Carolinas in 
early autumn, scarcely worth visiting unless one takes time to push on 
to its far-famed beach long miles away. Far-famed, that is, in Cuba, 
where beaches are rare and water sports much less popular than might 
be expected in a land where the sea is always close at hand and sum- 
mer reigns the entire twelve-month. Now and again some unheralded 
scene breaks the cane-green monotony. There is the little town of 
Colon, for example, intersected by the railroad, which passes along the 
very edge of its central plaza, decorated with a bronze statue of Colum- 
bus discovering his first land — and holding in his left hand a two-ton 
anchor which he seems on the point of tossing ashore. 

The older railroad line ends at Santa Clara, one of the few important 
towns of Cuba which do not face the sea. But the two daily expresses 
merely change engines and continue, in due season, to the eastward. 
An energetic Anglo-Saxon pushed a line through the remaining two 
thirds of the island within four years after American intervention, 
without government assistance, without even the privilege of exercising 
the right of eminent domain, though the Spaniards had been " studying 
the project " for a half century. There are no osteopaths in Santa 
Clara. They are not needed ; a ride through its incredibly rough and 
tumble streets serves the same purpose. In Havana it is often imprac- 
ticable for two persons to pass on the same sidewalk ; in many of these 
provincial towns it is impossible. The people of Santa Clara seem 
content to make their way through town like mountain goats, leaping 
from one lofty block of cement to mud-reeking roadway, clambering to 
another waist-high sidewalk beyond, mounting now and then to the 
crest of precipices so narrow and precarious that the dizzy stranger feels 
impelled to clutch the flanking house-wall, only to descend again swiftly 
to the street level, climbing over on the way perhaps a family or two 
" taking the air " and greeting them with an inexplicably courteous 
" Muy buenas noches." The citizens grumble of course at the condition 
of their streets and make periodical demands upon the federal govern- 
ment to pave them, as in all Latin America. The question often sug- 
gests itself, why the dev — , I don't mean to be profane, whatever the 
provocation, — but why in — er — the world don't you get together 



66 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

and pave them yourselves? But of course any newsboy could give a 
score of reasons why all such matters as that are exclusive affairs of 
" the government," and he would pronounce the word as if it were 
some supernatural power wholly independent of mere human assistance. 

In contrast, the central plaza of course is perfectly kept and, though 
empty by day, is more or less crowded in the evening, particularly when 
the band plays. Seeing only the crowd which parades under the royal 
palms in the moonlight, the visitor might come to the false conclusion 
that the majority of the population is white, and he would make a similar 
error in the opposite direction if he saw the town only by day. At the 
evening promenade there is a great feminine display of furs, though it is 
about cold enough for a silk bathing-suit ; the club members have a 
pleasant custom of gathering in rocking-chairs on the sidewalks before 
their social meeting-places facing the square. Club life in Cuba fol- 
lows the lead of family life in the wide-openness of its more public 
functions, though of course there is more intimate club and family 
activity far to the rear of the open parlors. 

If one is in a lazy mood one rather enjoys Santa Clara, though a 
hurried mortal would probably curse its leisurely ways, its languid 
style of shopping, for instance, with chairs for customers, and the in- 
variably male clerks thinking nothing of pausing in the midst of a pur- 
chase to discuss the latest cock-fight with a friendly lounger. We 
voted the place picturesque, yet when we took to wondering what made 
it so we could specify little more than the crowds of guajiros astride 
their horses, their produce in saddle-sacks beneath their elevated legs, 
who jogged silently through the muddy streets. Some of these were so 
superstitious in the matter of photography that they could only be 
caught by trickery. In the evening hours almost every block resounded 
with the efforts of amateur pianists. The Cubans are always beating 
pianos, but they are strangely unmusical. I have been told that a 
famous Cuban pianist won unstinted applause in New York, but of the 
hundreds we heard on the island each and all would almost infallibly 
have won something far less pleasing. 

Musically the Cuban is best at the native danson, a refinement of 
the savage African rumba. But every town large or small has its 
weekly concerts. Perhaps the most amusing one we attended was at 
the sugar-mill village of Jatibonico. The players were simple youths 
of the town, as varied in complexion and garb as the invariably tar- 
brushed promenaders who filed round and . round the grass-grown 
plaza. The instruments were so unorthodox that we paused to make an 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 67 

inventory of them. Besides a cornet played by an energetic youth who 
now and then made it heard far beyond the reach of the rest of the 
uproar, there was a trombone and two of what seemed to be half- 
breeds among horns, the manipulators of which varied the effect by now 
and then holding their hats over the sound exit. Then there was a 
cowhorn-shaped gourd which was scraped with a stick, a block of ebony 
that was periodically pounded by the same man who tortured the bass 
viol, two kettle-drums which would not be silenced on any pretext, 
a large metal bowl shaped like a water-jar, that had originally come 
from Spain filled with butter, in the single opening of which the player 
alternately blew and sucked, giving a weird, echo-like sound, and, to fill 
in any possible interstices of sound left, two heathenish rattles. The 
band had no leader ; each played or paused to smoke a cigarette as the 
spirit moved him, and all played by ear. The unexpected sight of white 
people among the promenaders caused the entire band to begin a series 
of monkey-like antics in an endeavor to outdo one another in showing 
off, until the tomtom effect of the entertainment took on a still more 
African pandemonium. To this was added the rumble of frequent 
trains along the near-by track and the vocal uproar of the promenaders, 
striving to imitate in garb and manner the retreta audiences of the larger 
cities. Long after we had retired a bugle-burst from the enthusiastic 
cornet-player now and then floated to our ears through the tropical night, 
for the amateurs had none of the weariness of professional musicians. 
When the plaza audience deserted them toward midnight, they set out 
on a serenading party to the by no means most respectable houses. 
Some of them sang -as well as played, in that horrible harmony of 
Cuba's rural falsetto tenors, only one of whom we ever heard without 
an all but overwhelming desire to fling the heaviest object within 
reach. 

Cienfuegos, on the seacoast south of Santa Clara, is said to derive 
its name from the exclamation of a sailor who beheld a hundred Indian 
fires along the beach. It might easily have won a similar designation 
from some wrathful description of its climate. The town was laid out a 
mere century ago by a Frenchman named Declouet, and many of its 
streets still have French names. It is reputed to be the richest town 
per capita on earth, though the uninformed stranger might not suspect 
that from its appearance. It gives somewhat more attention to pave- 
ments than some of its neighbors, to be sure, and has electric street- 
cars. But ostentation of its wealth is not among the faults of Cien- 
fuegos, perhaps because it takes its cue from its wealthiest citizen, who 



68 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

is said to lead by more than a neck all the millionaires of Cuba. Likft 
Mihanovisch in the Argentine, or the first Astor and Vanderbilt in our 
own land, this financial nabob of Cuba began at the bottommost rung of 
the ladder, having arrived from Spain in alpargatas and taken to carry- 
ing bags of cement on the docks. To-day he is past eighty-five and 
owns most of the property in Cienfuegos and its vicinity, yet, as one of 
his fellow-townsmen put it, " if you meet him on the street you want 
to give him an old suit of clothes." During the war he was placed 
on the British black-list, and was forced to come often to a certain 
consulate in an effort to clear himself, yet he invariably came on foot 
even though Cienfuegos lay prostrate under its skin-scorching summer 
noonday. He lived across the bay, and while there were millions in- 
volved in the business on hand at the consulate, he invariably persisted 
in leaving in time to catch the twenty-cent public boat, lest he be forced 
to pay a dollar and a half for a special launch. He abhors modern ways 
and in particular the automobile, and refuses to do business with any 
one who arrives at his office in one. The story goes that for a long 
time after the rest of the island had adopted them Cienfuegos did not 
dare to import a single automobile for fear of the wrath of its financial 
czar. 

But if the miser of Cienfuegos holds the palm for wealth, one of his 
near rivals in that regard outdoes him in political power. He, too, 
is a Spaniard, or, more exactly, a Canary Islander, like many of the 
wealthiest men of Cuba. To be born in the Canary Islands and to 
come to Cuba without a peseta or even the rudiments of education seems 
to be the surest road to riches. I could not risk setting down without 
definite proof to protect me the perfectly well-known stories of how 
" Pote " got his start in life. Though he owns immense sugar estates 
and countless other properties of all kind throughout the island, he is 
rarely to be distinguished from any unshaven peon, and even when 
a new turn of the political wheel brings him racing to Havana in a 
powerful automobile he still looks like some third-class Spanish grocer. 
Not until long years after the island became independent did the gov- 
ernment become powerful enough to force " Pote " to remove the 
Spanish flag from his buildings and locomotives, and the " J. R. L." on 
the latter still give them the right of way over many a rival cane- 
grower; for " Pote," whisper the managers of corporation sugar-mills, 
has ways of getting his product to the market which those who must 
explain to auditors and directors higher up cannot imitate. 

It is not without significance for the future of Cuba that men of 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 69 

this type, uneducated, unscrupulous, utterly without any ideal than the 
amassing of millions, wholly without vision, have the chief power in its 
affairs. Politically the island has been freed from Spanish rule, 
economically it is still paying tribute not merely in material things, but 
in spiritual, to the most sordid-minded of the grasping peninsulares. 

One other town and I am done with them, for though Sagua la 
Grande and Caibarien, Ciego de Avila and picturesque Trinidad, at 
least, are worthy a passing notice, there is something distinctive about 
Camagiiey, though the difference is after all elusive and baffling. For 
one thing it is more than four hundred years old ; for another it is the 
largest town in the interior of Cuba. Even it, however, did not shun 
the coast by choice, but ran away from the northern shore in its early 
youth to escape the pirates, and, to make doubly sure of concealment, 
changed its name from Puerto Principe to that of the Indian village 
in which it resettled. Its antiquity is apparent, appalling, in fact. 
Projecting wooden window grilles, heavy cornices, aged balconies, also 
of wood, and tiled roofs hanging well over the street, crumbling 
masonry, all help to prove the city a genuine antique. Few of its streets 
are straight, few parallel, few meet at right angles, the result being to 
give the visitor a curiously shut-in feeling. It is said that this civic 
helter-skelter is due to the fact that the refugees from the harassed coast 
staked their claims and built their houses at random in their haste to 
get under cover, though there is a bon mot to the effect that the streets 
were purposely made crooked to fool the pirates. The town is noted 
for its tinajones, in the legitimate sense, that is, for in Spanish the word 
means not only an immense earthenware jar, but a person with a large 
capacity for liquid refreshment. Some of these jars would easily 
contain the largest human tina j on; the majority of them are more than 
a hundred years old ; there are said to be none younger than sixty. 
They serve the same purpose as our cisterns. Several ancient churches 
lift their weather-dulled gray walls and towers above the mass of old 
houses. The majority of these are down at heel, their facades battered 
and cracked, though the patios or small gardens in their rear are gay 
with flowers and shrubbery. Most of its streets were once paved, but 
that, too, was long ago, and during the frequent rainy days one must 
pick one's way across them by the scattered cobbles embedded in mud 
as over a stream on stepping-stones. The railroad once offered to pave 
at its own expense the slough bordering the station, but the local 
politicians would not permit it, for the same reason that Tammany 
prefers to let its own contracts. Even the social customs of Camagiiey 



jo ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

are ancient. If " any one who is any one " dies, for instance, as they 
do not infrequently, '* everything " closes and all social functions are 
abandoned, often to the dismay of hostesses. The town is said to be 
famed for its beautiful women and its skilled horsemen ; its color-line 
is reputed more strict and its negro population less numerous than in 
the rest of Cuba, at least three of these things being credited to the fact 
that the region was long given over to cattle rather than sugar-cane, 
requiring fewer slaves. The casual visitor, however, sees little to con- 
firm these statements. 

To-day even Camagtiey province has succumbed to the cane invasion, 
like all Cuba, and the raising of cattle has become a secondary industry. 
Droves of the hardy, long-horned, brown breed may still be grazing 
the savanna lands, searching the valleys for tasty guinea-grass, standing 
knee-deep in the little rivers, but Cuba now imports meat, in contrast 
to the days when the exporting of cattle was one of her chief sources 
of revenue. The climate has had its share in bringing this change. 
Not only does it cause the milk to deteriorate in quantity and quality 
within a very few years, but the animals decrease steadily in size from 
generation to generation. Butter, unless of the imported variety, is as 
rare in Cuba as in all tropical America, and the invariable custom of 
boiling milk before using makes it by no means a favorite beverage. 
Besides, the constant drought in the United States does not extend to 
Cuba. But all these causes are but slight compared with the sky- 
rocketing price of sugar, which is swamping all other industries in the 
island, nay, even its scenery, beneath endless seas of cane. 

Our good hosts of Tuinucu varied their hospitality by bearing us 
off on a two-days' horseback journey into the neighboring mountains. 
A hand-operated ferry and a road that was little more than a trail, 
except in width, brought us to the Old World town of Sancti Spiritus, 
founded in 15 14 and rivaling in medieval architecture and atmosphere 
almost anything Spain has to offer. Here a prdctico, which corresponds 
to, but is apt to mean much less than a guide, took the party in charge 
and trotted away toward the foothills. A group of priests in their 
somber, flowing gowns and shovel hats grinned offensively at the un- 
wonted sight of ladies riding man-fashion, and the townsmen stared 
with the customary Latin-American impudence, but the countrymen 
greeted us with the dignified courtesy of old Castilian grandees. Pack- 
trains shuffled past in the deep dust now and then, the dozen or more 
undersized horses tied together from tails to halters. The fact that 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 71 

this left the animals no protection from the vicious flies meant no more 
to the compassionless guajiros than did the raw backs under the heavy, 
chafing packs. Cuba, like all Latin America, is a bad country in which 
to be a horse, or any other dumb animal for that matter. Much of the 
country was uncultivated, though royal palms and guinea-grass testified 
to its fertility. Big dark-red oxen or bulls were here and there plowing 
the gentler hillsides, more of them stood or lay at ease under the 
spreading ceiba trees. The region was once famed for its coffee, but 
even the few bushes that are left get no care nowadays and the time 
is already at hand when they are to give way before the militant sugar- 
cane. 

We turned into an old estate where a hundred slaves had once toiled. 
All but a corner of it was overgrown with bush ; the massive old planta- 
tion house had lost all its former grandeur except the magnificent views 
from its verandas. A disheveled family of guajiros inhabited it now, 
its cobbled courtyard seldom resounded to the hoofs of horses bringing 
guests to its very parlor door, the broad, brick-paved coffee-floor was 
grass-grown between its joints, the old slave inclosure had been turned 
over to the pigs, feeding on palmiche, the berries of the royal palm. 
The slattern who thrust her head out of the ruined kitchen building 
had little claim to propriety of appearance, though she answered a 
joking question as to whether she, too, would ride astride with a fervent, 
" Not I, God protect me ! " 

Reminiscences of slave days brought forth the story of " Old Con- 
cha " as we rode onward. She had been a slave on Tuinucu estate as 
far back as any one could remember, still is, in fact, in her own estima- 
tion. No one knows how old she is, except that she was married and 
had several children when the mother of her present mistress was a 
child. Her own answer to the question is invariably " thirteen." All 
day long she potters about the kitchen, though great effort has been 
made to get her to rest from her labors. She refuses to accept wages, 
only now and then " borrowing " a peseta, the total averaging perhaps 
five dollars a year, and being mainly spent for tobacco. Whenever any 
of the modern servants are remiss in their duties or show a suggestion 
of impudence she warns them that the " master's " whip will soon be 
tingling their legs, then, recalling herself, sighs for the " good old 
days " that are gone. She is the chief authority on forgotten family 
affairs, though incapable of keeping the " in-laws " straight. In her 
early days Concha accompanied her mistress to the United States. 
Arrived at the dock in New York, she submitted to her first hat, on the 



72 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

warning that she would be conspicuous without it — and raised it to 
all white people with whom she spoke. A custom officer questioned 
her right to bring in the fifty large black cigars which she had first 
attempted to conceal about her person, doubting that they were for her 
own use. Concha lighted one forthwith and quickly convinced the 
skeptic of her ability to consume them. It is useless to try to throw 
anything away at Tuinucu ; Concha is certain to retrieve it and stow 
it away in her little room, with her " freedom paper " and her souvenir 
hat. 

By sunset we were surrounded by mountains, though perhaps those 
of central Cuba should rather be called ranges of high hills. The little 
village of Banao was thrown into a furor of excitement by the arrival 
of " caballeros," and particularly by the announcement that we planned 
to camp out on the mountainside. Picnics are as unknown to the Cuban 
as to the rest of Latin America. Boys swarmed around us and scam- 
pered ahead in the swiftly falling darkness to show us a spot well up 
the slope where water and a bit of open ground were to be found. 
They told us many lugubrious tales of the dangers of sleeping in the 
open air and implored us to return instead to the hovels they shared 
with their pigs and chickens. When it became evident that we were 
not to be turned from our reasonless and perilous undertaking, they 
took to warning us at every step against the gnao, quite fittingly pro- 
nounced " wow ! " This is a species of glorified poison ivy, equally 
well named pica-pica. Drawbacks of this kind are rare in Cuba, how- 
ever, where there are few poisonous plants, no venomous snakes, not 
even potato-bugs ! The boys remained with us gladly until the last 
scraps of the camp-fire meal had disappeared, but fled with gasps of 
dismay at the suggestion that they spend the night there. 

The traveler in the West Indies must learn to rise early if he is to 
catch the best nature has to offer. Noonday, even when less oppres- 
sively hot than our own midsummers, thanks to the unfailing trade- 
wind, is glaring in its flood of colors, insistent, without subtleties. But 
dawn and sunrise have a grandeur and at the same time a delicacy, as if 
the light were filtered through gauze upon the green-bespangled earth, 
which even the gorgeous sunsets and the evanescent twilight cannot 
equal. As we watched the new day steal in upon us through the dense 
foliage, it would have been easy to fancy that we had been transported 
to some fantastic fairyland in which the very birds were bent on adding 
to the subtle intoxication of the visitor's senses. 

We beat the sun to the grotto of cold, transparent water and by 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 73 

the time it began to express itself in terms of heat were scrambling 
through the jungle to the nearest summit. Fresh coffee was to be had 
on many a bush for the picking; and inviting the red berries looked, 
too, until a taste of them had destroyed the illusion. He who fancies 
Cuban mountains are not high is due to revise his notions by the time 
he has dragged himself up the face of one of them through jagged 
rocks half concealed beneath the matted brush, over veritable hedges of 
needle-pointed cactus, now and again clutching as the only escape from 
toppling over backward a treacherous handful of '* wow." Our gar- 
ments were torn, our hands cut and stinging with pica-pica, our guide 
had degenerated from the fearless fellow of the night before to an 
abject creature who asked nothing better than to be left to die in peace 
by the time we reached the summit ; and even then it was no real summit 
at all, but only the first of half a dozen knobs which formed a species of 
giant stairway to some unknown region lost in the clouds. In the light 
of the struggle it had cost us to cover this infinitesimal portion of the 
scene before us we seemed mere helpless atoms lost in the midst of a 
ferocious nature which clothed the pitched and tumbled world far 
beyond where the eye could see in any direction ; or, to put it more 
succintly in the words of our host, we looked like worn-out fleas 
caught in the folds of a thick and wrinkled carpet. 

The ride homeward was by another road, boasting itself a camino 
real, but little more than a wide trail for all its claim to royalty. Black 
ranges studded with royal palms cut short the horizon. Gnajiros 
slipped past us here and there on little native horses of rocking-chair 
gait; others rode more slowly by perched on top of their woven-leaf . 
saddle-bags, bulging with produce, a chicken or two usually swinging 
by the legs from them ; all bade us a diffident " Muy buenas." Trees 
worthy of being reproduced in the stained-glass windows of cathedrals 
etched the sky-line. The stupid peon who posed as guide, flapping his 
wings with the gait of his horse like a disheveled crow, knew the names 
of only the most familiar growths, which would not so much have 
mattered had he not persisted in digging up false ones from the depths 
of his turbid imagination. Of the flowers, fruit, and strangely tame 
long-tailed birds he had as little real knowledge, though he had seen 
them all his life. Nor did he even know the road ; I have never met 
a Latin-American " guide " who did. A negro boy on horseback sing- 
ing his cows home from pasture ; a peasant in the familiar high- 
crowned, broad-brimmed hat of braided palm-leaves hooking together 
tufts of grass with a crotched stick and cutting them off with a machete; 



74 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

children gathering the oily palmiche nuts which are the chief delicacy of 
the Cuban hog, were among the sights of the afternoon. Next to 
sugar certainly the most prolific crop in Cuba is babies. Black, brown, 
yellow, and all the varying shades between, they not only swarm in 
the towns, but cluster in flocks about the smallest country hut, innocent 
of clothing as of the laws of sanitation, with no other joy in life than to 
roll about on the ground inside or around their little homes and suck 
a joint of sugar-cane. The houses of the peasants, still called by the 
Indian name of bohio, owe nothing to the outside world, but are wholly 
built of materials found on the spot, their very furnishings being woven 
palm-leaf hammocks, hairy cowhide chairs, pots and dishes made from 
gourds picked from the trees. The gates to many fincas, mildly re- 
sembling the entrances to Japanese temples, drew the eyes to more com- 
modious residences as we neared Sancti Spiritus once more, each casa 
vivienda of a single low story covered with a tile roof which projected 
far out over the earth-floored veranda surrounding it. Nor were these 
much different from the humbler bohios except in size, and perhaps an 
occasional newspaper to keep their owners somewhat in touch with the 
outside world. 

The day died out as we were jogging homeward along the dusty 
flatlands between endless vistas of sugar-cane. But as I have not the 
courage to try to describe a Cuban sunset I gladly yield the floor to the 
native novelist known to his fellow-countrymen as the " Zola of the 
Antilles," who has no fear of so simple a task: 

The sun agonized pompously between incendated clouds. Before it opaque 
mountains raised themselves, their borders dyed purple, orange, and violet. 
The astra itself was not visible, hidden behind its blood-streaked curtain, but 
one divined its disk in the great luminous blot which fought to tear asunder the 
throttling clouds ; and on high, light, white cupolas, like immense plumages, were 
floating, reddened also, like the dispersed birds of a great flock that had been 
engaged in sanguinary combat. A vast silence had established itself, the solem- 
nity of the evening which was rapidly expiring, with that brevity of the twilight 
of the tropics, which is similar to a scenic play arranged beforehand. On the 
blue-gray line of the sea the clouds had floundered in an immense stain of violet 
color, furrowed with obscure edges which opened themselves like the spokes of 
a gigantic wheel, in a dress of whitish blue, raising itself to the rest of the 
heavens. The disk of the sun was no longer evident; but, far off, some separate 
little clouds seemed to be touched by a lightly purple dyestuff. The picture 
changed with the celerity of an evening sunset on the stage, visibly obscuring 
itself, and by degrees, as if in that stage setting some one were shutting off, one 
after the other, the electric batteries, until the scene had been left in darkness. 
In a few minutes the great violet stain, formerly full of light, passed through all 



CUBA FROM WEST TO EAST 75 

the tones of color, to convert itself into a great lake, without brilliance, in 
which swam lead colored flocks of birds dyed with black. The delicate dye- 
stuff which embroidered for an instant the remote little clouds had suddenly 
rubbed themselves out. Only an enormous white plume, stretched above the 
place in which the sun had sepulchered itself, persisted in shining for a long 
time like a fantastic wreath suspended over the melancholy desolation of the 
crepuscule. Afterward that went out also. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 

CUBA produces more sugar than any other country in the world. 
During the season which had just begun at the time of our 
visit she expected to furnish four million tons of it. Barely 
as large as England, being seven hundred and thirty miles long and 
varying in width from twenty-two to one hundred and twenty miles, 
the island is favored by the fact that the great majority of her surface 
is level or slightly rolling, though the Pico de Turquino rises 8320 feet 
above the sea. Her soil is largely of limestone formation, with very 
little hard rock. She has considerable deep red earth which, scientists 
say, is deteriorated limestone without a trace of lime left in it. Fresh 
limestone brought down from the hills and scattered upon this quickly 
restores its virgin fertility, and it responds readily to almost any other 
fertilizers. There are regions in Cuba where this reddish soil permeates 
all the surrounding landscape, including the faces, garments, and off- 
spring of the inhabitants, giving its color even to their domestic animals. 
At least four fifths of the wealth and happiness of her population de- 
pends on her chief industry, and it is natural that everything else should 
take second place in the Cuban mind to the production of sugar. 

French colonists running away from their infuriated slaves in Haiti 
brought with them the succulent cane, and at the same time a certain 
love of comfort and various agricultural hints which may still be traced 
on some of the older estates. But the industry has been modernized 
now to the point where science and large capital completely control its 
methods and its output. The saying is that wherever the royal palm 
grows sugar-cane will flourish, while the prevalence of guinea-grass is 
also considered a favorable sign. As these two growths are well-nigh 
universal throughout Cuba, it would seem that the island is due to be- 
come an even greater leader in sugar production that she is already. 

The making of a Cuban sugar plantation is a primitive and, from our 
Northern point of view, a wasteful process consistent with virgin lands 
and tropical fecundity. Thus it seems in many parts of the island, par- 
ticularly in the Oriente, the largest and most eastern of Cuba's six 

76 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL yy 

provinces. Here vast stretches of virgin forest, often three to five 
thousand acres in extent, are turned into cane-fields in a few months' 
time. The usual method is to let contracts for the entire process, and 
to pay fixed sums for completely replacing the forests by growing cane. 
Bands of laborers under native capataces begin by erecting in the edge 
of the doomed woods their baracones, crudely fashioned structures 
covered with palm-leaves, usually without walls. Here the woodsmen, 
more often Jamaican or Haitian negroes than Cubans, swing their ham- 
mocks side by side the entire length of the building, if the long roof 
supported by poles may be called that, a few of them indulging in the 
comfort of a mosquitcro inclosing their swinging couch, all of them 
wrapping their worldly possessions in the hammock by day. Then with 
machetes and axes which to the Northerner would seem extremely 
crude — though nearly all of them come from our own State of Con- 
necticut — they attack the immense and seemingly impenetrable wilder- 
ness. 

The underbrush and saplings fall first under the slashing machetes. 
Next the big trees — and some of these are indeed giants of the forest 
— succumb before the heavy axes and, denuded of their larger branches, 
are left where they lie. Behind the black despoilers the dense green 
woodland turns to the golden brown which in the tropics means death 
rather than a mere change of season, and day by day this spreads on and 
on over plain and hillock into regions perhaps never before trodden by 
man. The easy-going planters of the olden days were apt to spare at 
least the royal palms and the more magnificent of the great spreading 
ceibas. But the practical modern world will have none of this compas- 
sion for beauty at the expense of utility. As an American sub-manager 
summed up the point of view of his class, "If you are going to grow 
cane, grow cane ; don't grow royal palms." Everythings falls before 
the world's demand for sugar, translated by these energetic pioneers 
from the North to mean the unsparing destruction of all nature's splen- 
dors which dare to trespass upon the domain of His Majesty, the 
sugar-cane. Mahogany and cedar — though occasionally the larger 
logs of these two most valuable of Cuban woods are carried to the rail- 
road sidings — are as ruthlessly felled as the almost worthless growths 
which abound in tropical forests. Here and there the contractor 
leaves an immense caguardn standing, in the hope that he may not be 
compelled to break several axes on a wood far redder than mahogany 
and harder than any known to our Northern timberlands. But the 
inspector is almost sure to detect his little ruse and to require that the 



78 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

landscape be denuded even of these resisting growths. Logs of every 
possible size and of a hundred species cut up the trails over which the 
sure-footed Cuban horses pick their way when the first inspection parties 
ride out through the fallen woodland. 

The clearing of a Cuban forest has in it little of the danger inherent 
in similar occupations in other tropical lands. Not only are there no 
venomous snakes to be feared, but there are few other menaces to the 
health of the workmen. Now and again a belligerent swarm of bees is 
encountered, along the coast streams the dreaded mansanillo sometimes 
demands the respect due so dangerous a growth. The sap of the 
mansanillo is said to be so poisonous that to swallow a drop causes 
certain death; hands and face sprayed with it by a careless blow of 
the ax swell up beyond all semblance to human form. When one of 
these rare species is found, the woodsmen carefully " bark " it and 
leave it for some time before undertaking the actual felling. But with 
few exceptions this is the only vegetation to be feared in a Cuban 
wilderness. Even the malarial fevers which follow not the cutting, 
but the burning, of the woodlands are less malignant than those of other 
equatorial regions. 

The burning usually takes place during the first fortnight of March, 
at the end of the longest dry season. Indeed, extreme care is exercised 
that the firing shall not begin prematurely, for the consumption of 
the lighter growths before the larger ones are dry enough to burn would 
be little short of a catastrophe for the contractors. When at last the 
fires are set and sweep across the immense region with all the fury of 
the element, fuel sufficient to keep an entire Northern city warm during 
the whole winter is swept away in a single day. At first thought it 
seems the height of wastfulness not to save these uncounted cords of 
wood, these most valuable of timbers, but not only would the cost of 
transportation more than eat up their value before they could reach a 
market, without this plenitude of fallen forest the burning would not be 
successful and the fertility of the future plantation would suffer. The 
time is near, however, scientists tell us, when the Cubans must regulate 
this wholesale destruction of their forests or see the island suffer 
from one of those changes of climate which has been the partial ruina- 
tion of their motherland, Spain. 

When the first burning has ended, the larger logs remaining are 
heaped together and reburned. Some of them, the jucaro, for instance, 
continue to smolder for months, this tree having even been known to 
burn from top to bottom after catching fire thirty feet from the 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 79 

ground. Though it is usual in the open savannas, plowing is not 
necessary in these denuded woodlands. Here all that is necessary is to 
hoe away the grass and the bit of undergrowth that remains. The 
primitive method of planting in the slave days still survives. In some 
sections a man sets out along each of the proposed rows carrying in 
one hand a long sugar-cane and in the other a machete. He jabs 
the cane into the ground at intervals of about three feet, slashes off the 
buried end with his cutlass, and marches on, to repeat the process at 
every step. More often nowadays one man goes ahead to dig holes 
with a heavy hoe, while another following him drops into each of them 
a section of cane and covers it with a stamp of his bare heel. Two 
joints and sometimes three are planted in each hole, to insure the 
sprouting of at least one of them. There is a more scientific system 
of planting, in which a rope with knots given distances apart is used, 
but the first method is more prevalent in the feverish haste of the 
Oriente. The fact that charred logs and stumps still everywhere litter 
the ground rather helps than hampers the growth of the cane, for as 
these rot they add new fertilizer to the already rich soil. 

Cane requires some eighteen months to mature in the virgin lands 
of Cuba, and will produce from twelve to twenty yearly crops without 
replanting. So prolific is the plant in these newer sections that when 
a lane several meters wide is left between the rows it is often almost 
impenetrable a year later. Cane high above the head of a man on 
horseback is by no means rare in these favored regions. By the begin- 
ning of our northern autumn the whole island is inlaid with immense 
lakes of maturing cane, the same monotonous panorama everywhere 
stretching to the horizon; the uniformly light green landscape, often 
spreading for mile after mile without a fold or a knoll, without any 
other note of color than the darker green of the rare palm-trees that 
have escaped destruction, grows fatiguing to the sight. Cane-fields 
without limit on each hand, flashing in the blazing sunshine, have a 
beauty of their own, though it is not equal to that of a ripening wheat- 
field with the wind rippling across it. There is less movement, less 
character; it has a greater likeness to an expressionless human face. 
Yet toward cutting-time sunrise or sunset across these endless pale 
green surfaces presents swiftly changing vistas which are worth travel- 
ing far to see. 

The " dead season," corresponding to the Northern summer, is a time 
of comparative leisure on the sugar estates. It is then that the higher 
employees, Americans in the great majority of cases, take their vaca- 



80 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tions in the North; it is then that the Spanish laborers who come out 
for each yearly safra return to enjoy their earnings in their own land. 
Then there is time for fiestas among the native workmen and their 
families and those from the near-by islands, who frequently remain 
the year round, time for " parties " and dances among the English- 
speaking residents of the batcy. The batey is the headquarters of the 
entire central, as the sugar estate is called in Cuba. It clusters about 
the ingenio, or mammoth sugar-mill, which stands smokeless and silent 
through all the " dead season," its towering chimneys looming forth 
against the cane-green background for miles in every direction. Here 
the manager has his sumptuous dwelling, his heads of departments their 
commodious residences, the host of lesser American employees their 
comfortable screened houses shading away in size and location in the 
exact gradations of the local social scale. Usually there are company 
schools, tennis-courts, clubs, stores, hospital, company gardeners to 
beautify the surrounding landscape. Outside this American town, 
often with a park or a flower-blooming plaza in its center, are scores 
of smaller houses, little more than huts as one nears the outskirts, in 
which live the rank and file of employees of a dozen nationalities. 
In the olden days, when many slaves were of necessity kept the year 
round, the batey was a scene of activity at all seasons. But the patri- 
archal plantation life, the enchantment of the old family sugar-mill 
where each planter ground his own cane, has almost wholly disap- 
peared before these giants of modern industry which swallow in a day 
the cane that the old-fashioned mill spent a season in reducing to 
sugar. 

With the expiration of slavery the patrician style of sugar raising died 
out. It became necessary, largely for lack of labor, partly for con- 
venience sake, to separate the agricultural from the other phases of the 
sugar industry. The more customary method to-day is to divide the 
estate into a score or more of " colonies," each in charge of, or rented 
to, a colono, who operates almost independently, at least until the cutting 
season arrives. A few companies are run entirely on the administrative 
system, directing every operation from planting to grinding from a 
central office ; some own little land themselves, but buy their cane of the 
independent planters in the surrounding region. But the colono sys- 
tem gives promise of surviving longest. For one thing, in case of 
drought or other disaster, the loss falls in whole or part on the planter 
instead of being entirely sustained by the company. Even when the 
land from which they draw their cane is not their own property, the 




Cuban travelers 




A Cuban milkman 




9^ h II ^ I 


^■jk * ~^SS3Hfli^l Shi 1 ifl 










THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 97 

growth, a menacing wilderness that invites few inhabitants. Only one 
abode of man breaks the journey, a cluster of sun-faded huts known 
as Siboney, on a rock before which stands a monument to the American 
forces that landed here for the march on Santiago. 

Farther on, where the sea hides its beauty behind a widening strip 
of rocks and bristling vegetation, are a few fertile patches densely 
covered with cocoanut and banana groves. A cocoanut plantation is 
the lazy man's ideal investment. Once it is planted, he has only to wait 
until the nuts drop to have a steady income, taking the trouble to husk 
them if he cares to save something on transportation, but needing to 
exert himself no further unless thirst forces him to walk up a 
tree and cut down one of the green nuts filled with its pint of cool 
and satisfying beverage. The mountains rose to ever more impres- 
sive heights as the tireless Ford screamed onward, their culminating 
peak exceeded only by the Pico Turquino, peering into the sky from 
a neighboring range. Half bare, brown of tint, wrinkled as the Andes, 
they rise majestically into the sky, and if they are not high moun- 
tains, as mountains go the world over, they are at least lofty enough 
to be cloud-capped in the early mornings and now and then during the 
day. Mining villages, of which there are several besides the "mother 
mine " of Daiquiri, began to appear, perched on projecting knobs and 
knolls, long before we drew up at the port where hundreds of tons of 
ore are dropped every week directly into the ships — when ships can 
be had. 

The mines themselves are laid out in full sight between heaven and 
earth. For they are open-work mines, each " bench " like the step of 
a giant stairway, reminding one of the Inca terraces of Peru. Steam- 
shovels gnaw at the two horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters, frequent 
explosions rouse the languid mountains to the exertion of sending 
back a long series of echoes, and the gravity-manipulated ore-buckets 
spin constantly away across the void to the crushers below. Here, too, 
the workmen are Spaniards who remain in Cuba only long enough 
to carry a villager's fortune back to their native land, and their labor 
in the open air gives them a tint far different from the human moles 
of most mining communities. Their houses are pitched high on a 
conical hill far above the mine, the married men living on the topmost 
summit, the " single village " farther down the slope, no doubt in order 
to convince the benedicts that they have risen to higher things. A 
locomotive dragged us up to the bit of a town, whence we rode on horse- 
back to the crest of another foothill, on which stood in splendid isola- 



98 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tion the residence of the bachelor manager. Of the veritable botanical 
and zoological gardens with which he had surrounded himself, of the 
beauty of the scene as the sun sank into the Caribbean far below, the 
rustling of the cocoanut palms in the steady breeze, and the distant 
sounds of the mining community settling down for the night I need say 
nothing except that we regretted we had not a hundred days instead of 
one to spend there. 

The manager had lived through several revolutions, the latest less 
than three years before, and had grown accustomed to have some 
brakeman or miner in his employ march into his office at the head of 
a dozen ragamuffins and announce that he had been made a colonel 
overnight. Luckily our host was quite plainly liked by all classes of 
the community, so that such visits were usually mere social calls, and 
he had only to congratulate the new military genius, give him a drink 
and smoke a cigarette with him as a sign of equality to have him offer 
the mine his protection even unto death and stalk merrily away at 
the head of his " troops." On the mountain-sides across a mighty 
gully and high above us were still the remnants of old French coffee 
plantations, with native squatters in the old houses. By daylight the 
steep slopes stood forth like aged tapestries, golden brown in tinge ex- 
cept where they were dotted with immense mango-trees which looked 
at this distance like tiny green bushes. There one may find dogs, cats, 
cattle, guinea-fowls, pigs, and coffee all gone equally wild since the 
days when the plantation owners fled. 

Wedded as it is to its sugar industry, Cuba is nevertheless capable 
of producing many other things. Of four-footed game there is little, 
as in all the West Indies. The aborigines must have been mainly vege- 
tarians, for the only animal on the island at the time of the discovery 
was the jutia, which looks like a combination of rat, opossum, and 
woodchuck, lives in mangroves and hilly places, feeds on the bark of 
trees, and is so tame and stupid it may be killed with a club. It is still 
eaten, " its flesh being much esteemed by those who like it," as one 
description has it, though to the unaccustomed it is oily and insipid. 
During the last century deer were introduced, which are fairly plenti- 
ful in some parts of the island and would be more so if there were game 
laws and any feasible means of enforcing them. Jutias and boniatos 
frequently constituted the entire commissary of the insurgents against 
the Spaniards. The latter is a tuber so prolific that an acre, free from 
insects, has been known to produce fifty thousand pounds of it in eigh- 






THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 99 

teen months. Its chief rival in the peasant's garden and on most 
Cuban tables is the malanga, the taro of the South Seas, easily dis- 
tinguishable by its large heart-shaped leaves. Of the feathered species 
there is a larger representation than of quadrupeds. Wild turkeys, 
called guana jos, abound, the flocks of guineas are sometimes so large 
as to do serious damage to the crops. The indigenous birds are dis- 
tinguished more by their color than by their ability to sing. The best 
of them in the latter respect is the sinsonte, which not only imitates the 
songs of other birds, but has been known to learn short pieces of music. 
Snakes are rare and never venomous, the largest being a species of boa 
constrictor with a tan-colored skin, so sleepy and harmless that small 
boys climb the trees in which it sleeps and knock it to the ground with 
sticks. Cuban oysters are much smaller than ours, though the natives 
claim they are more succulent and nutritious. There are lobsters also, 
but the finest of all Cuban sea foods is the congrejo moro, a huge crab 
with a beautiful red and black shell. Little corn is grown, and still 
less rice, though the latter invariably makes its appearance at the two 
daily meals. Vegetables, except for the malanga and boniato, are rare, 
as in all tropical America; fruit, on the other hand, almost unlimited. 
There are twenty varieties of bananas, seedy oranges may be had any- 
where, the mango, pineapple, mamey, gnayaba, mamoncillo, guand- 
bana, chirimoya, sapote or nispero, the papaya, a tree-grown melon su- 
perior to our best canteloupes and with a taste of honeysuckle, and 
the grape-fruit are among the many island delicacies, but only the pine- 
apple and grape-fruit are cultivated with any attention. Even with 
all these fruits to choose from the most familiar Cuban dessert is the 
apple, imported from our Northwestern States and retailing at from 
twenty to thirty cents each. Unfortunately, though most American 
fruits arrive in Cuba in perfect condition, few of those grown in Cuba 
can endure the journey to the United States. Lastly, for the ever- 
present palma real could not be left out of any mention of Cuban 
products, this most beautiful of the island's trees is as useful as it is in- 
comparable as a landscape decoration. The royal palm has no bark and 
the trunk is hollow, so that with a very little labor it can be fashioned 
into waterpipes or split into a rough and ready lumber. The fronds 
make splendid roofing, light, yet impermeable. The yagua, or leaf base, 
has a score of uses. Pigs prefer the oily little nuts which hang in 
clusters beneath the leaves to any other food. The branches to which 
these seeds are attached make good brooms ; salt can be had from the 



ioo ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

roots ; the " cabbage " from which the leaves gradually form makes an 
excellent salad, raw or cooked, and lastly, the lofty tree is peerless as a 
lightning-rod. 

Daiquiri and Cobre by no means exhaust the places of interest in 
the mammoth eastern province of Cuba. There are branch railroad 
lines, for instance, to the western, northern, and southern coasts of 
the province, each several hours from Santiago. On the way to Man- 
zanillo one passes the village in which the " Grito de Yara " began the 
revolt against Spanish rule, and in the neighborhood of which some of 
the old revolutionary leaders still live. Antilla, in the north, faces 
one of the most magnificent bays in the New World ; beyond the town 
of Guantanamo, noteworthy for its unbroken chorus of roosters, two 
little railways flank the opposite shores of the gulf of the same name, 
one of them passing through an entrancing little valley. The other 
wanders across a flat, thorny, and rather arid land to Caimanera, noted 
for its salt beds and as the nearest place free from the American 
drought which reigns perpetually over the station of our marines and 
sailors holding our naval base of Guantanamo Bay. 

He who comes to Cuba with the rigid American conception of the 
gulf separating the African and the Aryan races will find our ward 
little inclined to follow our lead in that particular matter. In the 
Havana custom-house his belongings will be examined by a black 
man. The finest statue in Cuba is that of the negro general, Maceo ; 
had he lived he would in all probability have been the island's first 
president. One soon becomes accustomed to seeing negroes slap white 
men on the back with a familiar " Hello, Jim," and be received by an 
effusive handshake. Sextets gathered for a little banquet at cafe tables 
frequently show as many gradations of color, from a native Spaniard 
to a full African, repulsive perhaps for his diamond rings and over- 
imitation of Parisian manners, and are served by obsequious white 
waiters. The majority of Cuban negroes, however, seem less objec- 
tionable than those in the lands where the color-line is closely drawn. 
Accustomed to being treated as equals, many of them have developed 
a self-respect and a gentlemanliness rare among our own blacks, or 
even among our working class of Caucasian blood. They have, too, 
a pride in personal appearance scarcely inferior to that of the some- 
times over-dressed white Cubans. Mark Twain once stated that there 
is much to be said for black or brown as the best tint for human com- 
plexions; one is often reminded of the remark in noting how hand- 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 101 

some some of these black Cuban dandies look under their stiff straw 
hats. 

Negroes, of course, are by no means in the majority in the largest 
of the Antilles, though most Cubans probably have African blood in 
their veins. In the Oriente may still be found traces of the Siboney 
Indians. Immigrants from all the varied provinces of Spain, African 
slaves, Chinese coolies, Creoles from Haiti, Louisiana, and Florida, and 
a scattering of many other races have mingled together for generations ; 
and from this blending of east and west, north and south, tempered by 
the tropical climate, emerges the Cuban. To a certain extent all these 
types have kept their racial characteristics, but they are only lost under 
the overwhelming influence of what may be called the national Cuban 
character, which varies little from that of all Latin-Americans. Like 
all nations, the islanders have their good and their bad points. The 
simple amenities of life are more thoroughly cultivated than in our own 
quick-spoken land. Rudeness is rare ; courtesy is wide-spread among 
all classes. One would scarcely expect to see duplicated in our large 
cities the action of a mulatto traffic policeman stationed on the busiest 
corner of Havana's plaza, who waited for a lull in the task assigned 
him to cross the street and, raising his cap, corrected a direction he 
had given me a moment before. I have heard a woman tourist who 
failed to understand one of these immaculate guardians remark petu- 
lantly to her companions, " You 'd think they 'd make them learn Eng- 
lish, would n't you? " Qur native tongue is often useless in Cuba, to be 
sure ; but how would it be if they, whoever they are, required travelers 
to learn Spanish before entering a Spanish-speaking country? The 
general courtesy is sometimes tempered by unintentional lapses from 
what we understand by that word; Cubans call one another, for in- 
stance, and try to call Americans, by a hissing " P-s-t," which is not 
customary in our own good society. They are emotional and excit- 
able ; their necessity for gesticulation frequently requires them to put 
down a telephone receiver in order to use both hands ; they have little 
concentration of attention, and are much given to generalizing from 
superficial appearances to save themselves the labor of going to the 
bottom of things. Of quick intelligence, they learn with facility when 
there is anything to be gained by learning, but memory rather than 
thought is their dominant faculty. This last is probably due to the 
antiquated methods of the schools, that make the child a mere parrot 
and never develop his powers of judgment and comparison, which 
often remain inactive and dormant throughout life. 



102 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

His politeness has its natural counterpart of insincerity until, in 
the perhaps too harsh words of one of his own people, " we cultivate 
falsehood with a facility which becomes prodigious." This insincerity 
is perhaps natural in a society that lived for centuries under constant 
suspicion of infidelity and surrounded by an atmosphere of distrust 
on the part of the Spanish rulers. Pride, which often reaches the 
height of a virtue among the Spaniards, is apt to degenerate in the 
Cuban to mere vanity, making him more susceptible to flattery than 
to reason. " Our dominating nervous temperament," says the native 
critic quoted above, " has contributed to make us irritable, sometimes 
insufferable. On account of this sensitiveness we have more sensa- 
tions than ideas, more imagination than understanding, with the result 
that when we turn our attention to anything the pretty is apt to have 
more importance than the true or useful. We are better path-followers 
than originators ; we prefer to triumph by astuteness rather than by 
reason ; we are prodigal, and for that reason the thirst for riches is our 
dominant characteristic. The rascality of our priests, largely from 
Spain, has made the average Cuban, if not an atheist, at least a skeptic 
and indifferent in religious matters." 

Americans who have lived in Mexico, of whom there are many now 
in Cuba, all make comparisons unfavorable to the Cubans. We did 
not meet one of them who was not longing for the day when they, men 
and women alike, could return to the land of weekly revolutions. " I 
hear," said a visitor from the North, " that the Cubans are rather 
slippery in business." " Say rather," replied an old American resident, 
" that they are good business men, with the accent on the business." 
This verdict seems to be almost unanimous. The Cuban has a habit 
of beating himself on the chest and shouting about his honor at the 
very moment when both he and his hearers know he is lying. It 
is natural, perhaps, that the heat of the tropics should breed hatred 
for work and cause men to become tricky instead. But this trickery 
is less conspicuous in business than in politics. The war gave Cuba 
an enormous commercial impulse, yet there are comparatively few 
Cubans in commerce. Parents prefer that their sons adopt profes- 
sions or enter government service. A Cuban congressman ended his 
appeal for a bill authorizing the government to send a hundred youths 
abroad each year to study commerce with, " Those who do not succeed 
in business can become government agents and consuls." The notion 
of foisting the failures upon the state awakened not a titter of sur- 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 103 

prise among his hearers ; they had long been used to that custom un- 
der Spanish rule. 

The Cubans are always discussing politics, though the great majority 
of them have no voice whatever in the government. To an even greater 
extent than with us the best men shun political office. The few of 
this class who enter politics soon abandon it in disgust and to an ig- 
norant and avaricious clique are left the spoils. More than one repre- 
sentative has learned to sign his name after being elected. One ad- 
mitted in public debate that he thought the Amazon was in Europe ; 
another scoffed at the idea that Cuba was entirely surrounded by 
water. Congressmen go to their sessions armed, and revolvers are 
frequently drawn during some heated controversy. Some of them 
have been known to take advantage of the immunity from arrest to 
refuse to pay their rent and to make attacks upon women. A recent 
president was elected on a platform of cock-fighting, a national lot- 
tery, and jai alai, this last being the Basque game of pelota, at which 
gambling flourishes at its best. The president now in power was ap- 
parently all that a president should be during the first few months of 
his term; to-day only those on whom he has showered favors have a 
good word for him. '* The Liberal who ruled before him was a 
grafter," say natives and foreign residents alike, " but at least he let 
other people get theirs, while this man grabs everything for himself. 
In other words he is as Conservative as the other was Liberal." If 
one is to believe local opinion, Cuba has had but two honest and efficient 
rulers since her independence, some say in her history, — her first 
elected president and her first American military governor. Love for 
the latter is almost universal ; one frequently hears the assertion that, 
if he could run and honest elections could be held, he would be elected 
president of Cuba by an overwhelming majority, notwithstanding that 
the average Cuban does not like the average American. 

Graft, known in Cuba as " chivo" is hereditary in the chief of the 
West Indies. In olden days Spain looked upon Cuba as a legitimate 
source of quick and easy gain. Royal grants were bestowed upon 
favorites ; titles and positions were created as a means of securing 
all the profit possible. The few years of American rule did little to 
eradicate this point of view, and the old idea still persists. Political 
positions are treated quite frankly as opportunities for amassing private 
fortunes, and the man in public life who does not take complete ad- 
vantage of his position is openly rated a fool. The reign of " chivo " 



104 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

is supreme through all the grades of officialdom ; it is not necessary to 
seek examples, they are constantly thrusting themselves upon the atten- 
tion. 

Investigation has shown that half the owners of private automo- 
biles and many liquor dealers have paid no licenses, but have " fixed 
it up " with the inspectors. During a recent hurricane the new sea- 
wall along the Malecon in Havana was totally wrecked, though the por- 
tion built during American rule suffered scarcely any damage. The 
millionaire Spanish contractor had saved on cement by giving part of 
the sum which should have been spent for it to those whose business 
it was to pass upon his work. The director of the national lottery made 
enough in four years to buy one of the largest sugar centrals on the 
island, and his position, you may be sure, did not come to him gratis. 
A real estate company offered to furnish the oil and tarvia if the gov- 
ernment of Havana would pave the streets of a new suburb ; one fourth 
of the material was actually used for that purpose and the rest was 
sold by the public officials. The church is not behindhand in the pur- 
suit of " chivo." Priests demand fabulous sums for marrying, and 
advise the guajiros and laboring classes who cannot pay for the cere- 
mony to go without, as thousands of families have done, many of them 
having accepted it years later as Christmas presents to themselves and 
their children from American employers. During the recent census 
conservative enumerators failed to enroll liberal citizens, thereby de- 
priving them of the right to vote; and if the tables had been turned, 
the only difference would have been that the other party would have 
lost their ballots. During the war a chain was lowered each evening 
across the mouth of Havana harbor as a protection against submarines ; 
an English captain who knew nothing of the new rule against enter- 
ing the port at night was arrested by a Cuban naval officer and then 
told that the matter could be " fixed up " for a twenty-dollar bill. 

" Concessions " and " permits " are the chief aids of the " chivo "- 
seeker. Each morning six men who have a " concession " netting them 
a neat little sum for gathering the rubbish floating on the water row 
across the harbor and back without touching the acres of flotsam, and 
hurry away to their private jobs early in the day. Havana has several 
new concrete piers, but they are not used because of " concessions " 
to the owners of tumbledown wharves. The same is true of a new 
garbage incinerator ; lighterage " concessions " cost fortunes in time 
and money to ships entering the harbor. Nothing can be built in Cuba 
without a permit. The man who wishes to erect a house in Havana 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 105 

draws up his plans and submits them to the city architects. As often 
as he comes to get them, he is informed that " the man who works on 
these matters is not here now, but " — and if he takes the statement 
at par, the plans are placed at the bottom of the pile again as he leaves ; 
but if he inadvertently slips a greenback of large denomination among 
them, the permit is forthcoming within twenty-four hours. One must 
have a permit to make the slightest alterations in house or office. An 
American who had secured a permission to paint his house was 
threatened with arrest for adding a second coat without another per- 
mit, and forced to " fix it up." When he tried to erect a fence he 
found that it could not be constructed of wood, but ten dollars made the 
inspector so blind that one erected of that material is represented on the 
city maps as made of cement and iron. The man who examines your 
baggage upon arrival in Havana will not pass it for hours or even days 
unless you accept his offer to have it transported to your hotel by dray- 
men of his choosing and at his price, and so on, through all the vicis- 
situdes of life and every branch of daily intercourse. Like the lianas 
and parasites which cling to the trees of Cuban forests, the productive 
class of the nation is everywhere supporting these useless hangers-on; 
and like those giants of the vegetable world the fertility of the island 
makes it strong enough to bear the burden without any serious impair- 
ment of its health and prosperity. 



CHAPTER V 

UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 

WE sailed away from Cuba on the Haitian Navy. It hap- 
pened that the fleet in question put into Guantanamo Bay 
to have something done to her alleged engine at a time 
which happily coincided with our own arrival at the eastern end of the 
island. Otherwise there is no telling when or how we should have 
made our second jump down the stepping-stones of the West Indies, 
for Cuba and Haiti do not seem to be particularly neighborly. 

The once proud Adrea of the New York Yacht Club is a schooner 
of almost a hundred tons, and still preserves some of her aristocratic 
features despite the lowly state to which she has fallen under her new 
name of L'Independance. Time was when the fleet of the Black Re- 
public boasted more than twice its present strength ; but the larger half 
of it was sold one day to the " slave trade," as they still call the carry- 
ing of negro laborers to the sugar-mills of Cuba, and on the two masts 
of L'Independance has fallen the entire burden of preserving the Hai- 
tian freedom of the seas. 

Eleven wild men, all of them, except one yellow fellow for contrast, 
blacker than the shades of a rainy-season midnight, made up her crew, 
and the deep-blue and maroon flag of sovereign Haiti flew at her stern. 
But there was a lighter tint superimposed upon this dark background 
both of flag and crew. The former bore the white shield which an- 
nounces a white man in command, and her three officers, averaging 
the advanced age of twenty-five, were as Caucasian as a New Eng- 
land village. In real life they were a bo's'n of the American Navy 
and two enlisted men of our far-flung Marine Corps, hailing from such 
quaint corners of the world as Cape Cod, Toledo, and Indianapolis ; 
but in that topsyturvy fairy- world of the West Indies they were all first 
lieutenants of the " Gendarmerie d'Ha'iti." 

By noon of a midsummer day in December L'Independance was 
rolling across the Windward Passage in a way out of all proportion to 
her importance or to the mere playfulness of the Caribbean waves. 

106 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 107 

When morning broke, the two horns of Haiti loomed far to the rear 
on each horizon, and we had already covered some two thirds of our 
journey. 

But not so fast, lest the inexperienced reader get too hasty and 
optimistic a notion of wind-wafted travel. A schooner is a most ro- 
mantic means of conveyance — when there is something to fill her 
sails. I can imagine no greater punishment for American impatience 
than to be sentenced to lie aimlessly tossing through the hereafter 
in tropical doldrums where even the fish scorn to bite. Evidently the 
winds within the gaping jaws of Haiti are as erratic as the untamable 
race that peoples its mountainous shores. 

However, let us avoid exaggeration. We did move every now and 
then, sometimes in the right direction, occasionally at a spanking pace 
that sent the blue waters foaming in two white furrows along our 
bows. Yet the mountainous ridges on either hand crept past with 
incredible leisureliness. All through the second night the tramp of 
hurrying bare feet and the stentorian " French " of the officers sounded 
about the deck cots we had preferred to the still luxurious cabins be- 
low — and by sunrise we had covered nearly twenty miles since sunset! 
Gonave Island, with its alligator snout, floated on our starboard all that 
day with a persistency which suggested we were towing it along with 
us. Brown and seeming almost bare at this distance, it showed no other 
signs of life than a few languid patches of smoke, which the mulatto 
cabin-boy explained as " Burn 'em off an' then make 'em grow." It 
was well that he had picked up a fair command of English somewhere, 
for the mere fact that we both prided ourselves on the fluency of our 
French did not help us in any appreciable degree to carry on conversa- 
tion with the black crew. The youthful officers, with that quick adapta- 
bility which we like to think of as American, had mastered their new 
calling even to the extent of acquiring that strange series of noises 
which is dignified in the French West Indies with the name of 
" Creole," but it would never have been recognized even as a foster- 
child on Parisian boulevards. 

The mountainous northern peninsula on our port grew slightly more 
variegated under an afternoon sun that gave the incredibly blue land- 
locked sea the suggestion of an over-indigoed tub on wash-day. The 
peninsula was brown, for the most part, with a wrinkled and folded 
surface that seemed to fall sheer from the unbroken summit into the 
placid blue gulf, and only here and there gleamed a little patch of 
green. Yet it must have been less precipitous than it seemed, for we 



108 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

made out through our glasses more than one clustered village along the 
hair-line where sea and mountains met, and now and then a fishing 
smack crawling along it put in at some invisible cove; 

Before the third day waned, our goal, Port au Prince, was dimly 
to be seen with the same assistance, a tiny, whitish, triangular speck 
which seemed to stand upright at the base of the hazy mountain-wall 
stretching across the world ahead. The wind, too, took on a new life, 
but it blew squarely in our faces, as if bent on refusing us admittance 
to our destination. The shore we were seeking receded into the dusk, 
and the men of endless patience which sailing-vessels seem to breed 
settled down to battle through another night, with little hope of doing 
more than avoid retreat. We were rewarded, however, with another 
of those marvelous West Indian sunsets which only a super-artist could 
hope to picture. Ragged handsful of clouds, like the scattered fleece 
of the golden-brown vicuna, hung motionless against the background 
of a pink-and-blue streaked sky, which faded through all possible 
shades to the blackening indigo of the once more limitless sea. 

How long the winds might have prolonged our journey there is no 
knowing. Out of the black night behind us there appeared what seemed 
a pulsating star, which gradually grew to unstar-like size and brilliancy. 
Excitement broke out among the three white mariners. One of them 
snatched an electric lamp and flashed a few letters of the Morse code 
into the darkness. They were answered by similar winkings on the 
arc of the approaching star. This shifted its course and bore down 
upon us. The captain caught up a megaphone and bellowed into the 
howling wind. The answer came back in no celestial tongue, but in 
a strangely familiar and earthly dialect: "Hello! That you, Louie? 
Tow ? Sure. Got a line, or shall I pass you one ? " A search-light 
suddenly revealed the navy of Haiti like a theatrical star in the center 
of the tossing stage ; a submarine-chaser snorted alongside us with 
American brevity ; our sails dropped with a run, and a few moments 
later we were scudding through the waves into the very teeth of the 
gale. When I awoke from my next nap, L'Independance was asleep at 
anchor in a placid little cove. 

Port au Prince is not, as it appears from far out in the bay, heaped 
up at the base of a mountain-wall, but stretches leisurely up a gentle, 
but constant slope that turns mountainous well behind the city. Off and 
on through the night we had heard the muffled beating of tom-toms, 
or some equally artistic instrument, and occasionally a care-free burst 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 109 

of laughter, that could come only from negro throats, had floated to 
us across the water. The first rays of day showed us a stone's-throw 
from a shore which the swift tropical dawn disclosed as far denser in 
greenery than a Cuban coast. The city lay three miles away across 
the curving bay. Two slender wireless poles and the stack of a more 
distant sugar-mill stood out against the mountain-range behind, while 
all else still hovered in the haze of night. Then bit by bit, almost 
swiftly, the details of the town began to appear, like a photographic 
plate in the developer. A cream-colored, two-towered cathedral 
usurped the center of the picture ; whitish, box-like houses spotted the 
slope irregularly all about it, and the completed development showed 
scores of little hovels scattered through the dense greenery far up 
the hillsides and along the curving shore. Then all at once a bugle 
sounded, an American bugle playing the old familiar reveille, and full 
day popped forth as suddenly as if the strident notes had summoned 
the world to activity. 

Two blacks, manning the schooner's tender, set us ashore in the 
Haitian " navy-yard," a slender wooden pier along which were moored 
three American submarine-chasers. An encampment of marines eyed 
us wonderingly from the doors of their tents and wooden buildings, 
beyond which a gateway gave us entrance to a thoroughly Haitian scene. 
A stony country road, flanked by a toy railway line, was thronged with 
the children of Ham. Negro women, with huge bundles of every 
conceivable contents on their heads, pattered past with an easy-going, 
yet graceful, carriage. Others sat sidewise on top of assorted loads 
that half hid the lop-eared donkeys beneath them. Red bandanas and 
turbans of other gay colors showed beneath absurdly broad palm-leaf 
hats. Elack feet, with the remnants of a slipper balancing on the 
toes of each, waved with the pace of the diminutive animals. The 
riders could scarcely have been called well dressed, but they were im- 
maculate compared with the throngs of foot travelers. A few scat- 
tered patches of rags, dirty beyond description, hung about the black 
bodies they made no serious effort to conceal. Men in straggly Na- 
poleon III beards clutched every few steps at the shreds which posed 
as trousers. Stark naked urchins pattered along through the dust ; 
more of them scampered about under the palm-trees. Bare feet were 
as general as African features. More than one group sidled crabwise 
to the edge of the road as we advanced and gazed behind them with 
a startled expression at the strange sound made by our shod feet. 
Scores of the most primitive huts imaginable, many of them leaning 



no ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

at what seemed precarious angles, lined the way. Before almost all 
of them stood a little " shop," a few horizontal sticks raised off the 
ground by slender poles and shaded by a cluster of brown palm-leaves. 
Vacant-faced negro men and women, none of them boasting a real 
garment, tended the establishments squatting or lolling in the patches of 
shade which the early morning sun cast well out into the roadway. 
The stock in trade of the best of them would not have filled a market- 
basket. A cluster of bananas; a few oranges, small, but yellower 
than those of Cuba ; bedraggled-looking alligator-pears ; dust-covered 
loaves of bread, no larger than biscuits, made up the most imposing ar- 
rays. Many of the " merchants " had not advanced to the stick-counter 
stage, but spread their wares on the ground — little handsful of tiny 
red beans laid at regular intervals along a banana-leaf, similar heaps 
of unroasted coffee, bundles of fagots, tied with strips of leaf, that 
could easily have gone into a coat-pocket. Now and again some black 
ragamuffin paused to open negotiations with the lolling shopkeepers, 
who carried on the transaction, if possible, from where they lay, ris- 
ing to their feet only when the heat of the bargaining demanded it. 
The smallness of each purchase was amusing, as well as indicative of 
Haitian poverty. One orange, a single banana, a measureful of a 
coarse, reddish meal tinier than the smallest glass of a bartender's para- 
phernalia, were the usual amounts, and the pewter coins that exchanged 
owners were seldom of the value of a whole cent. With rare excep- 
tions the purchasers wolfed at once what they had bought as they pat- 
tered on down the road. 

Details came so thick and fast that it was impossible to catch them all, 
even with a kodak. Compared with this, Cuba, after all, had been 
little more than semi-tropical. Here the vegetation, the odors, the very 
atmosphere were of the genuine tropics. Breadfruit-trees, with their 
scolloped leaves, which we had never seen in the larger island to the 
westward, shouldered their way upward among the cocoanut-palms. 
Mango-trees, as dense as haystacks, cast their black shadows over the 
rampant undergrowth. But always the eyes came back to the swarms 
of black people, with their festoons of rags contrasting with, rather 
than covering, their coal-tinted bodies. What might have seemed a 
long walk under a tropical sun became a short stroll amid this first 
glimpse of an astonishingly primitive humanity. 

For all their poverty, the inhabitants seemed to be frankly happy 
with life. They had the playfulness of children, with frequent howls of 
full-throated laughter ; they seemed no more self-conscious at the super- 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI in 

tattered state of their garments than were the ambling, over-laden 
donkeys at the ludicrous patchiness of their trappings. That lack of 
the sense of personal dignity characteristic of the African came to their 
rescue in the abjectness of their condition. For they were African, as 
thoroughly so as the depths of the Congo. We had strolled for an 
hour, and reached the very edge of the city itself, before we met not 
a white man, but the first face that showed any admixture of Caucasian 
blood. Compared with this callous-footed throng the hodgepodge of 
Cuban complexions seemed almost European. 

As we neared the town, a train as primitive as the scene about us 
chattered round a bend in the tunnel of vegetation, the front of its 
first-model engine swinging like the trunk of an excited elephant. The 
four open, wooden cars that swayed and screamed along behind it were 
densely packed with passengers, yet even here there was not a white 
face. The diminutive tender was piled high with cordwood little 
larger than fagots, and the immense, squatty smokestack was spitting 
red coals over all the surrounding landscape. As the train passed, the 
negro women along the road sprang with a flurry of their ragged skirts 
upon the track and fell to picking up what we took to be coins scat- 
tered by some inexplicably generous passenger. Closer investigation 
showed that they were snatching up live coals with which to light 
the little brown clay pipes which give them a flitting resemblance to 
Irish peasants. 

A lower-class market was in full swing in a dust-carpeted patch of 
ground on the city water-front. Here the wares were more varied than 
in the roadside " shops," but sold in the same minute portions. Ameri- 
can safety-matches were offered not by the box, but in bundles of six 
matches each, tied with strips of leaf. Here were " butcher-shops," 
consisting of a wooden trough full of meat, which owed its preserva- 
tion to a thorough cooking, and was sold by the shred and consumed on 
the spot. Scrawny, black hags, who had tramped who knows how many 
miles over mountain-trails with an ox-load of oranges or coarse tubers 
on their heads, squatted here all the morning selling a pennyworth of 
their wares at a time, the whole totaling perhaps forty cents, to be 
squandered for some product of civilization which they would carry 
home in the same laborious fashion. The minority of the women 
venders had come on donkeys and were frank in impressing upon 
their more lowly sisters the aristocracy which this sign of wealth and 
leisure conferred upon them. A native gendarme, dressed in a cheap- 
looking imitation of the uniform of our own marines, but as African 



ii2 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

of soul beneath it as the most naked of his fellow-citizens, strutted 
back and forth through the throngs of clamorous bargainers. Now 
and again, when a group grew too large for his liking, he charged into 
it, waving a long stick and striking viciously at the legs and backs of 
all within reach, irrespective of sex or age. Far from fighting back 
or even showing resentment, the childlike blacks fled before him, often 
with shrieks of laughter. Ours were the only white faces within the 
inclosure, yet we were given passage everywhere with an unostentatious 
consideration that in less primitive societies would be called extreme 
courtesy. 

Beggars as inhumanly sunk in degradation as the lowest pariahs of 
India shuffled in and out, mutely holding forth filthy tin cups to those 
barely a degree above them in want and misery. Near the gate a 
seething crowd was collected around a pushcart filled with tin cans of 
all sizes, tumbled pellmell together just as they had been slashed open 
and tossed aside by a marine mess orderly. An old woman was selling 
them to eager purchasers, who looked them over with the deliberate 
care one might give an automobile offered for sale, parted at length 
with the price agreed upon, after long and vociferous negotiations, and 
wandered away gloating over the beauty of their new acquisition, some 
of them talking to it in their incomprehensible " French." The prices 
varied from "cinq cob" (5 centimes, or 1 cent) for a recent container 
of jam or pork and beans to a gourde (twenty cents) or more for the 
five-gallon gasolene tins that make such splendid water buckets on the 
head of the Haitian women. In another corner was arranged in the 
dust a display of bottles of every conceivable size, shape, and previous 
occupation, from three-sided pickle flasks to empty beer bottles, con- 
stituting the entire stock in trade of two incredibly ragged females. 
Scarcely a scrap or remnant, even of things which we hire men to 
carry to the garbage heap, but had its value to this poverty-stricken 
throng. Particularly was anything whatever resembling cloth made 
use of to the utmost end of its endurance. One of the best dressed 
of the pulsating collection of tatters was a powerful black fellow who 
strutted about in a two-piece suit fashioned from unbleached muslin 
that had entered upon its second term of servitude. Unlike those of his 
fellows, both garments were whole, except for one three-cornered rent 
in what, to a less self-confident being, would have been an embarrassing 
position. Diagonally across the trousers, just above this vent, blazed 
the word " Eventually," and below it the pertinent query, " Why not 
now ? " 




The entire enlisted personnel of the Herttian Navy 




A school in Port au Prince 




The Central Square and Cathedral of Port au Prince on Market Day 




Looking down upon the market from the Cathedral platform 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 113 

The American residents of Port au Prince complain that visitors of 
scribbling propensities have given too much space to its comic-opera 
aspect. It is hard to avoid temptation. The ridiculous is constantly- 
forcing itself into the foreground, innocently unaware of distracting 
attention from the more serious background. For there is such a back- 
ground, one which should in all fairness be sketched into any picture of 
Haiti which makes a pretense of being true to life. If there has been 
a constant tendency to leave it out, it is probably due to the fact that 
the average wanderer over the face of the earth finds most " interest- 
ing " the incongruous and the ludicrous. 

To close our eyes, then, for the moment to the more obvious details, 
the capital of the Black Republic is by no means the misplaced African 
village which common report would indicate. Its principal streets are 
excellently paved with asphalt ; scores of automobiles honk their way 
through its seething streams of black humanity. Even along the water- 
front the principles of sanitation are enforced. Barefooted " white 
wings," distinguished by immense green hats of woven palm-leaves 
worn on top of their personal headgear, are constantly sweeping the 
city with their primitive bundle-of-grass brooms. A railroad, incred- 
ibly old-fashioned, to be sure, but accommodating a crowded traffic 
for all that, runs through the heart of the town and connects it with 
others considerable distances away in both directions. An excellent 
electric light service covers the city. Its shops make a more or less 
successful effort to ape their Parisian prototypes ; its business offices 
by no means all succumb to the tropical temptation to sleep through the 
principal hours of the day. The French left it a legacy of wide streets, 
though failing, of course, to bequeath it adequate sidewalks. Its archi- 
tecture is a surprise to the traveler arriving from Cuba ; it would be 
far less so to one who came direct from Key West. Wooden houses 
with sloping roofs are the general rule, thin-walled structures with huge 
-slatted doors and windows, and built as open as possible to every breeze 
that blows, as befits the climate. There are neither red tiles, strangely 
tinted walls, nor Moorish rejas and patios to attract the eye. Indeed, 
there is little or nothing in the average street vista to arouse the admira- 
tion, though there is a certain cause for amusement in the strange juxta- 
position of the most primitive African reed huts with the attempts of 
Paris-educated mulattoes to ape, with improvements of their own, their 
favorite French chateaux. 

Only two buildings in Port au Prince — one might perhaps say in all 
f.aiti — boast window-glass. One is the large and rather imposing 



H4 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

cathedral, light yellow both outside and within, flooded with the aggres- 
sive tropical sunshine in a way that leaves it none of the " dim and mystic 
light " befitting such places of worship. The other is the unfinished, 
snow-white presidential palace, larger and more sumptuous than our own 
White House. The cathedral looks down upon the blue harbor across 
a great open square unadorned with a single sprig of vegetation; the 
palace squats in the vast sun-scorched Champs de Mars, equally bare 
except for a Napoleonic statue of Dessalines, his telltale complexion 
disguised by the kindly bronze, and attended by a modest and deeply 
tanned Venus of Melos. The absence of trees in the public squares 
gives assistance to the wooden houses in proving the city no offshoot of 
Spanish civilization. The tale runs that the Champs de Mars was once 
well wooded until a former president ordered it cleared of all possible 
lurking-places for assassins. 

But Port au Prince is by no means unshaded. The better residential 
part up beyond the glaring parade-ground makes full use of the gor- 
geous tropical vegetation. Here almost every house is hidden away in 
its grove of palms, mangos, breadfruit, and a score of other perennial 
trees, and flowering bushes, ranging all the way from our northern 
roses to the pale-yellow of blooming cotton-trees and enormous masses 
of the lavender-purple bougainvillea, crowd their way in between the 
tree-trunks. Oranges, bananas, and the pear-shaped grape-fruit of 
Haiti hang almost within reach from one's window; alligator-pears 
may be had in their season for the flinging of a club ; he who cares to 
climb high enough can quench his thirst with the cool water of the 
green cocoanut. The dwellings here are spacious and airy, their ceil- 
ings almost double the height of our own, and if they lack some of the 
conveniences considered indispensable in the North, they have instead 
splendid swimming-pools and, in many cases, such a view of the lower 
city, the intensely blue bay, and the wrinkled brown ranges of the 
southern peninsula as would make up for a far greater scarcity of 
the stereotyped comforts. 

It is a leisurely, but constant, climb from the water-front to these 
forest-embowered dwellings. Port au Prince is not blessed with a 
street-car system, and its medieval railroad staggers only to the upper 
edge of the Champs de Mars. Moreover, the painted drygoods-boxes 
on wheels are invariably so densely crammed with full-scented blacks 
that not only the white residents, but even the haughty yellow ones, 
rarely deign to patronize the spark-spitting conveyance. Long-estab- 
lished families have their private carriages; the parvenus from foreign 



'ft 9 ¥5 ' '.■ 



■ 



» \ "M 'A I. .v « •</♦, «rv-M 'v. >v 

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A Cuban residence in a new clearing 




Planting sugar-cane on newly cleared land 




Hauling cane to a Cuban sugar mill 




A station of a Cuban pack-train 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 81 

companies keep a force of inspectors who ride day after day through 
the cane-fields, offering advice to the colonos here, ordering them to 
change their methods there, if they are to remain in the good graces 
of the central management. The latter keeps in its offices large maps 
of all the region from which its mill is fed, noting on each plot the 
condition of the soil, the age of the cane, particularly whether or not 
it has been burned over, that it may be assigned its proper turn for 
cutting when the grinding season begins. 

Fires are the chief bugaboo of the sugar growers. All the fields 
are cut up into sections by frequent guardarayas, open lanes some fifty 
yards wide which serve not only as highways, but as a means of con- 
fining a conflagration to the plot in which it starts. In many cases there 
are little watch towers set up on stilts from which to give warning in 
case of fire, while special employees sometimes patrol the fields during 
the drier months. Rural guards of the " O. P." corps have orders to 
be constantly on the lookout for incendiaries ; when a fire starts they 
immediately surround the field, and woe betide the luckless mortal who 
is caught in it, for all Cuba is banded together to punish the man who 
wantonly or carelessly brings destruction upon their principal product. 

A cane fire is an exciting event, not to say a magnificent sight. 
Starting in a tiny puff of vapor where some careless smoker has tossed 
a match, from a passing locomotive, or by intention, it quickly gives 
warning by the black-brown column of smoke which rises high into the 
clear tropical heavens. Whistles, bells, anything capable of making a 
noise, join in the din which summons planters, employees, and neigh- 
boring villagers to stem the threatened catastrophe. By the time the 
bright red flames begin to curl above the cane-tops men and boys of 
every degree, color, and nationality are racing pell-mell from every 
direction toward them, colonos, overseers, rural guards, Americans, 
Chinamen, Spaniards, West Indian negroes, Cubans ranging from the 
village alcade to bootblacks. Many of these bring with them machetes, 
others catch up clubs, handsful of brush, the tops of banana plants, and 
fall to threshing the flames, which by this time are crackling like the 
tearing up of thousands of parchments. Men on horseback race up 
and down the open lanes, directing the fighters, ordering the cutting of 
a new gnardaraya there, commanding the lighting of a back-fire yonder. 
The air is full of black bits of cane leaves, the sun is obscured by the 
grayish-brown smoke which envelops all the struggling, shouting multi- 
tude and covers the field with an immense pall. A gust of wind sends 
the flames jumping to another plot, whirlwinds caused by the heat catch 



82 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

up the sparks and scatter them at random. New-comers join in the 
turmoil, indifferent alike to their garments and their skins. Half- 
asphyxiated men stumble out to the open air, gasp a few lungsful of it, 
and dash back into the fray ; the now immense column of smoke can 
be seen over half the province. The pungent scent of crude sugar 
ladens all the air. Bit by bit the leaping flames decrease under the 
chastisement of hundreds of weapons, or confess their inability to leap 
across a wider guardaraya. The crackling loses its ominous sound, the 
voices of men are heard more clearly above it, gradually it succumbs 
to the noise of threshing bushes, the last red glare dies out, and the 
struggle is over. The motley throng of fighters, smeared, smudged,^ 
and torn, emerge into the open lanes, toss away their improvised 
weapons, and straggle homeward in long streams, while sunset paints 
the now distant smoke-cloud with brilliant colors, flecked by the little 
black particles which still float in the air. The burning of a cane-field 
does not mean the complete loss of its crop. Only the leaves are con- 
sumed ; the parched canes are still standing. But these must be cut and 
ground quickly if their juice is to be turned into sugar; the ringing of 
the heavy cane-knives resounds all through the following day, and by 
night the field stands forlorn and ugly in its nudity. 

One by one during the month of October the mills of the island begin 
their grinding. The cutting has started two days before, and inces- 
santly through the weeks that follow the massive two-wheeled carts, 
drawn by four, six, ten, even twelve oxen, drag the canes to the mill, 
now straddling the charred stumps and logs which litter new fields for 
years after the first planting, now wallowing in the sloughs into which 
they have churned the lanes and highways. Or, if the fields are too 
far away, the ox-carts halt at railway sidings, where immense hooks 
catch up their entire load and deposit them in cane-cars, long trains 
of which creak away in the direction of the ingcnio. The planters are 
paid on a percentage basis, from five to seven arrobas of sugar, or its 
equivalent in cash at that day's market quotation, for a hundred arrobas 
of cane, a system which gives the colono his share in any increase in 
price. The workmen, more than half of whom are foreigners, are paid 
by the " task," their earnings depending on their strength and diligence. 
The natives have a reputation for doing less than their competitors. 
There are Cubans who work in both the tobacco and sugar zafras, but 
most of them are content to spend from four to six months in the cane- 
fields earning their five to eight dollars a day, and to loaf and buy 
lottery tickets the rest of the year. The result is that the entire island 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 83 

has a toilsome, preoccupied air during our winter months and a holiday 
manner throughout the summer. 

Grinding time is the antithesis of the " dead season." Then the dull 
sullen grumble of the mill never ceases, fiestas and " parties " are for- 
gotten, all but the higher employees and the field-men alternate in their 
twelve-hour shifts between night and day, with little time or inclination 
left for recreation.' The chimneys of the ingenios belch forth constant 
columns of smoke, by night their blaze of electric lights makes them 

** visible far off across the country. Once dumped in the chutes the canes 
have no escape until they have reached the market, or at least the 
warehouse, in the form of sugar. Rivers of juice run from beneath 

1 the rollers to the boiling vats; the centrifugals, most often tended by 
Chinamen, whirl the thick molasses into grains, great bags of which 
are stood end up on the necks of burly negroes and trotted away to the 
almacen. The porters must be burly, for Cuba still retains the bag 
used in slave days, holding thirteen arrobas, or two hundred and seventy- 
five pounds, and the negroes insist they must run with them to keep 
from falling down. It has more than once been proposed to reduce 
the size of the bags, but this would require a change all the way back 
to India, where jute and bags originate. 

From the days of the primitive trapiche, when two logs turned by 
an ox or a donkey constituted a Cuban sugar-mill, through the period 
of individual growing and grinding, when an army of slaves worked 
under the whip for the benefit of an ignorant and often lazy and licenti- 
ous owner who considered that work his right, down to the immense 
ingenio and extensive batey of modern times, Cuba has been more or 
less exploited for the benefit of other lands and peoples. Even to-day, 
when fabulous wages are paid to the men who do the actual toiling 
under the tropical sun, much of the profit from her soil brings up 
eventually in the pockets of others. Few are the centrals which do not 
win back a considerable portion of the wages they are forced to pay 
by maintaining company stores in which the prices are exorbitant, or 
in selling the right to maintain them. Many an American manager 
frankly admits the injustice of this, yet all assert themselves unable 
to remedy it. Of the sums carried off by workmen from other lands 
the Cubans have no complaint, admitting that they earn their hire. 
But there is a growing tendency to grumble that the island is being 
more thoroughly exploited now than in the days of slavery, for it 
comes to the same thing, they contend, whether the larger portion of 
their national riches go to Spanish masters or to stockholders who have 



84 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

never set foot on Cuban soil. Notwithstanding that the island claims 
more wealth per capita than any other land on earth, the inhabitants are 
not satisfied, either with themselves or with circumstances, as a brief 
extract from the native novel already several times quoted will indi- 
cate: 

They [foreign stock-holders] are the owners of everything, soil and industry. 
We abandon it to them with good grace so long as they leave to us the politics 
and public careers, that is, the road of fraud and life with little work. On the 
other hand they, the producers, profoundly despise us. It is the case of all 
Latin-America. While we gnaw the bone the true exploiter, who is no Cuban, 
eats the meat. And if we growl, showing our teeth, all they have to do is to 
complain to the diplomats. Then they hand us a kick, one on each side, and the 
matter is settled. 

In contrast to the United States, Cuba grows wilder, more pioneer- 
like, from west to east. The traveler is aware of this increase of 
wilderness about the time he passes Ciego de Avila and the line of the 
old trocha across the island at the slenderest part of its waist, where 
are still seen remnants of the long row of forts from sea to sea with 
which the Spaniards vainly hoped to keep the rebels in the eastern end 
of the island and save at least the advanced and more populous western 
half from open rebellion. There are, to be sure, aged towns and 
pueblos on the sunrise side of the trocha. Camagiiey, for instance, 
could scarcely be called a parvenu ; and Baracoa, on the extreme eastern 
beach of the island, is Cuba's first settlement. But the fact remains 
that the traveler feels more and more in touch with primeval nature 
as he advances to the eastward. 

Small as it looks on the map, it is hard to realize that for vast 
distances the island of Cuba is still the unbroken wilderness of the days 
of Columbus. Though it is frequently broken by long stretches of 
civilization, the virgin forest is always near at hand on this eastward 
journey. There are frequent sugar estates, immense stretches of pale- 
green cane from horizon to horizon, but they are of the rough, wasteful, 
unfinished type of all pioneering. Cattle dot the great savannas, sleek, 
contented-looking cattle of a prevailing reddish tinge, and scarcely bear- 
ing out the assertion that the Cuban climate tends to dwarf their size. 
These unpeopled savannas are often of a velvety brown, now gently 
rolling, more commonly as flat as the sea itself, and stretching away 
farther than the eye can follow with the same suggestion of endless- 
ness. Gazing out across them, one likes to let the imagination play on 
the simpler pre-Columbian days when only the Siboney Indians trekked 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 85 

across them in pursuit of the one four-foot game with which nature 
stocked the island, the diminutive jutia. 

Of a score of striking trees with which these more open regions are 
punctuated, the broad-spreading, openwork, lace-like algarrobo, thorny 
and of slight value, is the most conspicuous, almost rivaling the ceiba 
and the royal palm in the ability to etch the sky-line with its artistic 
tracery. Stations are far apart and primitive in character in this 
region. Now and again one of special interest brings the long Habana- 
Santiago train to a laborious and often lengthy halt. There is Omaja, 
for example, said to have been settled by immigrants from Nebraska, 
and laboring under the Cubanization of the name they brought with 
them. It is the same sun-washed collection of simple dwellings and 
wide-open pioneer stores as everywhere greets the eye of the Cuban 
traveler. Yet the American's influence is seen in the immense width of 
its one street and the more sturdy aspect of its wooden housss, crude, 
yet not without the simpler comforts. The Americans of Omaja, like 
several other groups that have settled in Cuba, came to plant fruit, with 
the accent on the toronja, or grape-fruit, so popular on Northern break- 
fast-tables, yet so scorned by the rural Cuban. But it was their bad 
luck to strike one of those curious dry spots frequent even in the wettest 
American tropics, and most of the score who remain have turned their 
attention to lumber. There are long rows of sturdy fruit-trees, how- 
ever, as heavy with grape-fruit as a Syrian peddler with his pack, and 
hundreds of the saffron-yellow spheres lie rotting under the trees. 
Lack of transportation answers for many incongruities. Some of the 
orchards have been planted with cane, and only the deep-green crests 
of the trees gaze out above the pale-verdant immensity. Yet prosper- 
ity seems to have come to some of the settlers despite droughts and 
scarcity of rolling-stock, for in the neighborhood of Omaja are several 
big farm-houses of the bungalow family which can scarcely be the 
products of Cuban taste. 

Beyond come more miles of the lightly wooded wilderness, every- 
where spotted with cattle, here and there a large banana plantation, 
and frequent half-clearings in the denser forest, heaped with huge logs 
of red mahogany and other valuable woods. The railroad itself does 
not hesitate to make ties and trestle beams of the precious caoba, the 
aristocracy of which is much less apparent in its own setting than after 
the expense of distant transportation has been added to its cost. Then 
again, like a constant reiteration of the main Cuban motif, come the 
endless seas of cane, sometimes full-grown and drowning all else except 



86 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the majestic palms, sometimes just started in a flood of the bluer young 
plants that cannot yet conceal the burned stumps and charred logs of 
regions recently deforested. For a while cultivation disappears entirely, 
and the dense virgin forest, just as nature meant it to be, impassable, 
hung with climbing lianas, draped with " Spanish moss," its huger 
trees bristling with flowerless orchids of green or reddish tint, its count- 
less species of larger vegetation choked by impenetrable undergrowth, 
shuts in the track for many an uninhabited mile. 

But hungry mankind does not long endure this unproductive sloven- 
liness of nature. Gangs of men as varied in color as the vegetation in 
species are laying waste new areas of wilderness, and preparing to com- 
plete with fire the work of their axes and machetes in taming the un- 
broken soil for human purposes. Half-naked families of incredible 
fecundity swarm to the doors of thatch cabins, to gaze after the fleeing 
train like wild animals catching their first glimpse of the outside world. 
It would be easy to imagine that the clearing away of the forest has 
uncovered these primitive dwellings and their denizens, as it has brought 
to light the ant-nests in the crotches of the trees. They seem as little 
a part of the modern world as the shelter of some prehistoric Robinson 
Crusoe. 

At Cacocum, the junction for Holguin, up in the hills to the north, 
the primitive and the latest advances of civilization mingle together. 
Gaping guajiros watch the unloading of apples and grapes, the chief 
delicacies of Cuban desserts, that were grown in the northwesternmost 
corner of the United States. The tougher breeds of automobiles wait 
to whiz immaculate travelers from distant cities away into the appar- 
ently trackless wilderness; inhabitants of those same Robinson Crusoe 
huts come down to exchange roasted slabs of the half-savage hogs which 
roam the forests for silver coins and crumpled paper bearing the effigy 
of American Presidents. 

Farther on, we were still more forcibly snatched back to the present 
and the modern. The train burst suddenly upon an immense expanse 
of cane, beyond which a low range of mountains, black-blue with a 
tropical shower, stretched away with ever-increasing height to the 
southward. Almost at the same moment we drew up at the station of 
Alto Cedro, junction of the line from Nipe Bay, into which a ship 
direct from New York had steamed that morning. It had brought 
one of the first flocks of migratory human birds that annually flee 
before the Northern winters, made doubly rigorous now by a nation- 
wide drought. The Cuban passengers of the first-class coach were as 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 87 

suddenly and completely swamped under the aggressive flood of tour- 
ing Americans as were the native chests and bundles in the baggage-car 
beneath a mountain of trunks which flaunted the self-importance of 
their owners. The tales of sad mistakes in picking lottery numbers and 
debate on the probable arrobas of the cane zafra, in the softened Span- 
ish of Cuba, turned to chatter of the latest Broadway success and to 
gurgles of joy at escaping from a coalless winter, in a tongue that 
sounded as curiously anachronistic in this tropical setting as the heavy 
overcoats with which the new-comers were laden looked out of place. 

The moon was full that evening, and its weird effect was enhanced 
by a slight accident that left the car without lights. Royal palms, 
silhouetted against the half-lighted sky, stood out even more strikingly 
than by day. The moonlight fell with a silvery sheen on the white-clad 
negroes who lined the way wherever the train halted, casting dense- 
black shadows behind them. Below San Luis junction, where automo- 
biles offered to carry passengers down to Santiago in less time than the 
train, the vegetation grew unusually dense, the most genuinely tropical 
we had ever seen in Cuba. Immense basins filled with magnificent 
clusters of bamboo, royal palms in irregular, but soldierly, formations 
along the succeeding crests, masses of perennial foliage heaped up in 
the spaces between — all shimmered in the moonlight as if the earth 
had donned her richest ball-dress for some gala occasion. We sped 
continually downward, snaking swiftly in and out through the hills 
despite the frequent anxious grinding of the brakes. Here we sank into 
the trough of one of the few deep railway cuts in Cuba, there we rumbled 
across viaducts that lifted us up among the fronds of the royal palms. 
A white roadway darted in and out in a vain attempt to keep pace with 
us. Now we plunged into tunnels of vegetation, to burst forth a moment 
later upon a vast rolling plain washed by the intense tropical moon- 
light, which seemed to fall on the humble thatched roofs scattered about 
it with a curiously gentle, caressing touch. Our descent grew gradually 
less swift, the hills diminished and shrank away into the distance, and 
at length the lights of Santiago, which had flashed at us several times 
during the last half-hour, spread about us like a surrounding army. 

The short stretch between San Luis and Santiago is one of the pret- 
tiest in Cuba. Travelers covering it twice would do well to make 
one trip in automobile. It was our own good fortune to pass four 
times over it under as many varying conditions. The two-engine 
climb in the full blaze of day shows the scene in a far different mood 
than under the flooding moonlight; the ascent at sunset has still an- 



88 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

other temperament; yet it would be hard to say which of the three 
journeys more fully emphasizes the beauty of a marvelous bit of 
landscape. Possibly the trip by road has the greatest appeal, thanks 
chiefly to an embracing view of Santiago and all its wooded-moun- 
tain environment from the crest of a precipitous headland. In the early 
days of American occupation a splendid highway was built, perhaps 
in the hope that the Cubans would some day be moved to carry it on 
across the island to Havana, perhaps that they might have a sample 
of real roadway to contrast with their own sad trails. But the natives 
do not seem to have taken the lesson to heart. They call the road 
" Wood's Folly," and though it still retains some of its former per- 
fection, the condition into which it has already been permitted to lapse 
does not promise well for the future. To the Cubans, content, ap- 
parently, to jounce over all but impassable caminos, the building of 
good highways will probably be long considered a " folly." 

Though comparisons are odious, Santiago is the most picturesque 
city of Cuba, so far as we saw it in two months of rambling to and 
fro over most of the island. This is due largely to the fact that it is 
built on and among hills. Seen from the bay, or from several other 
of the many points of vantage about it, the city lies heaped up like a 
rock pile, the old cathedral, which some unhappy thought has subjected 
to a " reforming," crowning the heap, which spreads out at the base 
as if it had lain too long without being shoveled together again. 
Several other church-spires protrude above the mass, but none of them 
is particularly striking. Taken separately, perhaps its houses are little 
different from prevailing Cuban architecture elsewhere ; built as they 
are on the natural terraces of the hills, they are lifted into plainer 
view, each standing forth from the throng like the features of persons 
of varying height in a human crowd. Huge walls from ten to twenty 
feet high prove to be merely the foundations of the dwellings above, 
which look out head and shoulders over their next-door neighbors be- 
low, to be in turn overshadowed by their companions higher up. San- 
tiago confesses to more than four centuries of age, and proves the 
assertion by her appearance. The medieval architecture which the 
conquistadores brought with them direct from Spain has persisted, and 
has been reproduced in newer structures more consistently than in 
Havana. The red-tiled roofs curve outwardly far over the street with 
a curiously Japanese effect. Balconies high above the pedestrian's 
natural line of vision prove on nearer approach to jut out from the 
ground floor. Sometimes the steep streets tire with their climbing 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 89 

and break up frankly into broad stairways. In other places they fall 
away so swiftly that they offer a complete vista of multicolored house- 
walls, plunging at the end into the dense blue of the landlocked har- 
bor. 

Santiago is picturesque because of its quaint old customs, its amus- 
ing contrasts, the fantastic colors of its buildings, and the tumbled 
world that lies about it. All Cuban cities offer a motley of tints, but 
Santiago outdoes them all in the chaotic jumble of pigments. In a 
single block we found house walls of lavender, sap green, robin's- 
egg blue, maize yellow, sky gray, Prussian blue, salmon, tan, vermilion, 
and purple. This jumble of colors, with never two shades of the 
same degree, gives the city a kaleidoscopic brilliancy under the tropical 
sun that is equally entrancing and trying to the eye. Of quaint old 
customs there is that of setting the entrance-steps sidewise into the 
wall of the house, so that it must be a sharp-eyed resident who recog- 
nizes his own doorway. It is a less open town than others of Cuba, 
for the steepness of the streets has raised the windows above the level 
of the eye, and only here and there does the stroller catch that compre- 
hensive glimpse of the interior which elsewhere gives him a sense of 
intruding upon the family circle. It has, however, those same wide- 
open, yet exclusive, clubs whose members love to lounge in full sight 
of their less-favored fellow-citizens. Of contrasts between the old 
and the new there are many. Pack-trains of mules and asses pass 
under the very lee of the balcony dining-room overlooking the central 
plaza, where migratory mortals sup in full-coursed, solemn state. On 
Saturdays all sorts and conditions of human misery crawl in and out 
among luxurious automobiles, begging their legitimate weekly pit- 
tance. There are few Fords in Santiago ; the steepness of her streets 
make more powerful cars essential to certain progress. On the other 
hand, the medieval horse-drawn carriage rattles and shakes its palsied 
way though the narrow callcs with a musical jangle of its warning bell. 

Time was when Santiago was a sink of disease, if not of iniquity. 
It has largely recovered from that condition, and its hundred thousand 
inhabitants, tainted in the vast majority of cases with the blood of 
Africa, no longer live in constant fear of sudden death. The prin- 
cipal streets are well paved; its dwellings and places of public gather- 
ing are moderately clean, though in the dry winter season dust swirls 
high and penetratingly with every gust of wind. The third city of the 
island in commercial importance — Cienf uegos having outstripped it 
in this respect — it is the second in political significance. Some rate it 



90 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

first in the latter regard, for it is usually the pot in which is brewed 
the most serious causes of indigestion for the Central Government at 
Havana. Santiago has always been noted for an Irish temperament 
that makes it constitutionally " ag'in' the gover'ment." 

Outside the center of town its streets are little more than mountain 
trails. The houses degenerate to thatched hovels of mud and plaster ; 
full-blooded negroes loll in dingy doorways, which give glimpses of 
contentment with pathetically few of this world's comforts. Not a 
few of these outskirts' inhabitants are Jamaicans. One recognizes 
them by their ludicrous attempts at aloofness from the native black 
Cubans, by their greater circumspection of manner. Here and there 
a group of them, usually all women, struggle to make some native 
urchin understand the error of his ways and the reason for their in- 
comprehensible displeasure, and patter off, at least loudly discussing 
his misbehavior in their heavy, academic English. In these sections 
the picturesqueness of Santiago is apt to express itself chiefly in the 
variety and pungency of its odors. 

Officially the city is " Santiago de Cuba," so called by its sixteenth- 
century founders to distinguish it from its namesake, Santiago de 
Compostella in Spain. Foreigners and even the Cubans of the Western 
provinces address it familiarly by the first name; the natives of the 
Oriente dub it " Cuba." Walled on all sides by what to the Cubans 
are high mountains, it offers a striking panorama from any high point 
in the city. In places the ranges of big hills, culminating in Pico Tur- 
quino, are as brown, bare, and nakedly majestic as the Andes ; in others 
they are half wooded with green scrub forests, above which commonly 
float patched and irregular cloud canvases on which the tropical sun- 
sets paint their masterpieces with lavish and swift hand. 

The city cemetery across the harbor is somehow less gruesome than 
most Cuban burial-places. For one thing, it is unusually gifted with 
grass and trees and the aery forms of tropical vegetation, instead of 
being the bare field of most campos santos in Spanish America. Its 
graves, however, are family affairs, built of cement and six or eight 
" stories " deep, so that the coffins are set one above the other, as their 
time comes, in perfect chronological order. Over the top, commonly a 
bare three or four feet above the grass, is laid a huge stone slab, pre- 
ferably of marble, with immense brass or nickeled rings at each corner 
by which to lift it, and space on its top for a poetic epitaph to each suc- 
ceeding occupant. As in all Spanish countries, the tombs of all but the 
wealthiest inmates are rented for a term of years, at the end of which 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 91 

time, if the descendants fail to renew the contract, the bodies are tossed 
into a common graveyard, to make room for those of greener memory. 

Marti, the Cuban " Father of Liberty," is buried here, and Estrada 
Palma, promoted from humble pedagogue in one of our own schools 
to first President of Cuba. But neither holds the chief place in the 
heart of the Cuban masses. That is reserved for Maceo, the negro 
general killed just before the dawn of independence during a foolhardy 
scouting expedition in the woods of Cacahual, in company with a bare 
half-dozen soldiers. The gardeners seemed unusually industrious in 
the cemetery the day of our visit ; it was only next morning that we 
discovered they were preparing for the Cuban " Memorial day," which 
is observed throughout the island, with much spouting of poetry and 
laying on of flowers, on December 7, the anniversary of Maceo's death 
at the hands of the Spaniards. 

San Juan Hill is a mere knoll in comparison with the ranges that 
surround it on all sides. A street-car sets one down within a few hun- 
dred yards of it, or one may stroll out to it within an hour along a 
very passable highway. The " peace tree," an immense ceiba under 
which the contending generals came to terms, is peaceful indeed now, 
with only the twittering of birds to break the whisper of its languid 
leaves, except when a flock of tourists swirl down upon it in one of 
Santiago's hired machines and bellow for " Old Jeff " to come and tell 
them, in the inimical dialect of our Southern " darky," the story of his 
last battle. From the ugly brick tower which marks the summit of 
the only Cuban hill known to the average American, El Caney lies 
embowered in its thick-wooded mountain-slope a few miles away, the 
same dawdling, sleepy village it was when the Americans stormed it 
more than twenty years ago. 

Morro Castle, unlike its prototype in Havana, is not visible from the 
city ; nor is the Caribbean itself. As one chugs-chugs down the land- 
locked bay, " Cuba " shrinks away, and finally disappears entirely in a 
fold of the fuzzy hills, before the ancient fortress, framed in the bluest 
of blue seas, comes into sight. Beyond the point where the Merrimac 
failed in its perilous mission a sheltered cove, with a rusted cannon 
here and there among the bushes, gives landing-place, and leaves the 
visitor to scramble upward along an ancient cobbled roadway completely 
arched over in place with the rampant vegetation. Nature is similarly 
toiling to conceal the old fortress from modern eyes, and bids fair 
in time to succeed. The dismal dungeons, the gruesome death-chamber, 
are still there, but the decay that has let the sunshine filter into them 



92 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

here and there has robbed them of their terror, and left only an im- 
perfect setting for the anecdotes of a bygone age. Lizards and others 
of their sort are the only inhabitants of El Morro now, and through the 
huge holes in the outer walls made by American cannon one may gaze 
out ajong the Caribbean to the hazy, mountainous shore where still lie 
some of the skeletons of Cervera's fleet. 

Whatever else he misses in Santiago, the traveler should not fail to 
spend a Sunday evening in the central plaza. It is a small block 
square, completely paved in asphalt, and furnished with an equal pro- 
fusion of comfortable benches and tropical vegetation. Any evening, 
except in the rainy season when the afternoon shower is delayed, will 
find it a study in human types ; but toward sunset on Sunday it becomes 
the meeting-place par excellence of Santiago's elite. They gather in 
almost exact order of social rank, the smaller fry first, then the more 
pompous citizens, until, by seven in this " winter " season, the families 
that the foreign visitor never sees at any other time of the week 
stalk past in the continual procession. The men, formed three or 
four or even six abreast, march on the inside, clock-wise ; the women 
saunter in similar formation around the outer arc of the circle in the 
opposite direction. A pace of about a mile an hour is a sign of proper 
social breeding. Negroes are by no means lacking in any Santiago 
gathering, but they are in the minority at this weekly promenade. 
The color line is not sharply drawn, but it is approximate, in that each 
rank or group has its own gradations of tints. The women seldom 
wear hats ; the younger girls tie with a single ribbon the hair that hangs 
down their backs. Rice powder is in plentiful evidence on every 
feminine face, very few of which, candor obliges the critical observer 
to admit, can be called attractive. The men, never robust, more often 
slender to the point of effeminacy, one and all wear stiff straw hats, 
tipped back at exactly the angle approved by the Latin-American ver- 
sion of Parisian fashion. A felt hat is prima-facie evidence of a 
foreigner ; a Panama, all but universal in the country towns, is almost 
never seen. Swarms of children of all sizes and colors, the offshoots 
of the wealthier families, ludicrously overdressed, scamper in and out 
with an abandon in inverse ratio to the social strata to which they 
belong. Saucy, rather insolent boys of from twelve to fourteen, dressed 
like their elders down to the last trousers' crease, swing their diminu- 
tive canes and strut along among the men, who treat them with that 
curious oblivion to their immaturity that is prevalent in all Latin 
America. Young as they are, they are old enough to ogle the little 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 93 

girls of similar age in the approved fashion, half admiringly, half sug- 
gestively, with a cynical shadow of a smile that seems to belie the 
patent evidence of their age. Nor are the over-dressed little maids 
behindhand in the game of mutual admiration their elders are playing, 
and they pass the same quick signs of recognition to their small boy 
friends as do their older sisters to their own forward admirers. 

If the municipal band plays the retrcta, this inevitable Sunday evening 
is enlivened, but Santiago comes for its weekly promenade whether 
there is music or not. By the height of the evening every plaza bench, 
the entire quadrangle of stone balustrade backed by the low grille in- 
closing the square, are compactly occupied with admiring citizens or 
with older promenaders catching their breath after their undue exer- 
tions. Seven-passenger cars filled with elaborately upholstered matrons 
deathly pale with rice powder, with a few elderly, over-slender males 
tucked in between them, snort round and round the square ; the electric 
lights among the palm-trees disclose a slowly pulsating sea of humanity, 
chiefly clad in white ; the murmur of a thousand low voices resembles 
the sound of a broken waterfall ; the musical tinkle of the steel tri- 
angles of sweetmeat-sellers blends harmoniously into the suppressed 
uproar. " Every one worth knowing " knows every one else in the 
throng. The straw hats are frequently doffed with elaborate courtesy ; 
gentle little bows pass incessantly between the two opposing columns ; 
the language of fans is constantly in evidence. The requirements of 
dress are exacting at this general weekly airing. Ladies of San- 
tiago's upper circle must indeed find it a problem not to be detected 
here too often in the same gown; the men of the town may be seen 
hurrying homeward every Sunday afternoon from their cafe lollings 
or their cock-fights to don their spotless best; negroes of both sexes, 
starched and ironed to the minute, walk with the circumspection of 
automatons just removed from excelsior-packed boxes. From our 
Northern point of view, there is much ill-mannered staring, an ogling 
of the younger women which, though accepted as complimentary in 
Cuba, would be nothing short of insulting with us. But with that ex- 
ception, and a tendency of columns a half-dozen abreast not to give 
way when courtesy would seem to demand it, there is a general po- 
liteness, an evidence of good-breeding in the slight social amenities of 
daily life, that it would be hard to duplicate in our own brusk-mannered 
land. 

The plaza promenade is a more general gathering-place, a more 
thorough clearing-house of common acquaintance, than any included 



94 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

in Anglo-Saxon institutions. Nowhere do the inhabitants of our own 
cities so thoroughly mingle together irrespective of class. At the 
weekly meeting business men make many of their coming engagements 

— or explain the breaking of one arranged the week before. Here 
old friends who find no other chance to get together spend an hour 
talking over old times; here youth forms new acquaintances, here 
kindred spirits who might otherwise never have met make enduring 
friendships. The exclusiveness of family life wherever Spanish civ- 
ilization has set its stamp is offset by the intercourse fostered by these 
Sunday evenings in the public plazas. There the first tender glances 
pass between youth and maid, to be followed, with due propriety of 
delay, by soft words whispered through the reja of her prison-like home, 
and finally by his admittance, under parental supervision, to the chair- 
forested parlor, whence there is seldom any other escape than past 
the altar. There, too, looser characters sometimes form their attach- 
ments, but always with due outward propriety. The best-behaved city 
of our own land cannot be freer from visible evidence of human per- 
versity than the island of Cuba. 

Toward eight the plaza throng begins to thin out. The more haughty 
ladies of the znda social and their cavaliers stroll away up the labori- 
ously mounting streets toward the better residential districts. The 
second social stratum follows their lead in all but direction, descend- 
ing instead the calles that pitch downward toward the hart -or. All 
but the rattletrap automobiles that ply for hire have snorted away. 
The average tint of the promenaders grows steadily darker. Within 
a half hour the plaza has become plebeian again both in manner and 
garb ; in place of the compact throng their remain only a few scattered 
groups. In contrast, the luxurious clubs, facing the square, have 
taken on new life. The municipal council meets in its wide-open 
chamber across the way, a rabble peering in upon it through the heavy 
iron bars of the rejas. Inside, beneath an elaborate painting of San- 
tiago's first alcade — who was none other than the conquerer of Mexico 

— taking his first oath of office, politician-faced men of varying de- 
grees of African ancestry slouch down into their seats with the super- 
bored attitude of legislators the world over. On a rostrum backed 
not by likenesses of Cuba's native heroes, but by a portrait of Roose- 
velt as a young- man and another of our own President, a kinky-haired 
orator begins a peroration that rouses shrill roars of delight from the 
reja-hugg'mg mob far into the moonlighted tropical night. 



THE WORLD'S SUGAR BOWL 95 

Cuba's patron saint, though she has never received official papal 
sanction, is the Virgin of Cobre. The tale of her miraculous appear- 
ance is monotonously similar to that with which most Spanish-speaking 
peoples explain their dedication to some particular enshrined doll. 
Some three hundred years ago, the legend runs, two men and a negro 
slave boy from the village of Cobre, not far from Santiago, went to 
Nipe Bay to gather salt. There they found, floating on the water, an 
image of the Virgin, bearing the Child on one arm and holding aloft 
a gold cross. After various vicissitudes which the mere heretic may 
pass over in silence the image was set up in a shrine on the top of 
Cobre hill, in a church that had been specially erected for it. 

The figure is of wood, about fifteen inches high, and gaudily decor- 
ated with the silks and jewels given by the pious believers. If one 
may accept the testimony of the Cubans of the less-educated class, 
particularly the fishermen, the Virgen de Cobre has performed many 
astounding miracles. At any rate, her priestly attendants have been 
richly showered with worldly gifts, and her shrine is surrounded 
with costly votive offerings — or was, at least, until some one ran away 
with most of them about the time Spanish rule in Cuba was abolished. 
Pilgrims still flock to Cobre, especially during the first days of Septem- 
ber, and if they do not leave gifts of value, at least they decorate the 
church with crude and amusing drawings depicting the miracles that 
have been performed for them, or with wax likenesses of the varying 
portions of their bodies that have been cured by her intercession. A 
guagna crowded with women of the masses jolts out to Cobre from 
Santiago even during the off season. Now and then one runs across 
Cuban women of similar antecedents wearing copper-colored orna- 
ments and even entire costumes of that shade, as signs of having dedi- 
cated themselves, in gratitude for her favors, to the Virgin of Cobre. 
Many a Cuban church displays a replica of the famous image, with a 
miniature boat, carved from wood and bearing the three salt-gatherers, 
beneath it. 

But the world changes, and the time came when the Virgin entered, 
in all innocence, into conflict with practical modern forces beyond her 
control. Copper was discovered in the hill beneath her. An English 
company contracted to make good any damage their mining operations 
might cause to the venerated shrine. During their tenure the church 
suffered no injury. The mine was worked to what was considered 
the limit of its real productiveness under old methods and was then 



1 



96 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

abandoned. When world conflict suddenly made copper worth in- 
creased exertion, Cobre was taken over by an American syndicate. 
The mine had meanwhile filled with water. When the new company 
began pumping this out, the old supporting timbers gave way and the 
church of the Virgin on the hilltop above began to sink. In time it fell 
completely out 'of sight. A new shrine, monotonously like the spire- 
less and uninspiring country churches to be found throughout all Cuba, 
was erected for the Virgin and her pilgrims farther down the valley. 
The Archbishop of Santiago ■ — ■ for the old Eastern city still remains 
the religious capital of the island despite Havana's greatness — entered 
suit against the new company on the strength of the old English agree- 
ment. In his innocence of things worldly and geological the ecclesi- 
astic feared that the tricky Yankees were forestalling him by washing 
out the ore in liquid form. An injunction ordered them to stop pump- 
ing, and the mine rapidly filled again with water. At length the prince 
of the church won his suit, with damages in excess of the value of 
the mine. The Americans abandoned what had become a more than 
useless concession, and to-day a mineful of water, colored with copper 
sulphates and lapping undetermined streaks of ore, remains the property 
of the Virgin of Cobre. 

Daiquiri is not, as Rachel was justified in supposing, a cocktail fac- 
tory, but an eminently respectable iron mine belonging now to a great 
American syndicate. It lies a score of miles eastward along the coast 
from Santiago, and may be reached — when the company chooses it 
shall be — by a little narrow-gage railroad older than Cuban inde- 
pendence. From a. dusty suburb of the eastern metropolis we traveled 
thither by cigiicna, as Cubans call a Ford with railroad feet. The half- 
breed conveyance roared down a dry and rocky cavern to the coast, 
bursting out upon the incredibly blue Caribbean beside a forgotten 
Spanish fortress all but hidden under the rampant vegetation. For a 
time the line spins along on the very edge of the sea, which lashes con- 
stantly at the supporting boulders, and affords the seeker after scenic 
beauties an entrancing vista of mountain headlands protruding one 
after another into the hazy distance. This coastal region has little 
in common with the fertile and richly garbed flatlands of the interior. 
Jagged coral rock, known as dientas de pcrro (dog's teeth) to the 
Cubans, spreads away on the left and here and there rises in forbid- 
ding cliffs on the right. Vegetation is prolific, as always in the tropics, 
wherever a suggestion of foothold offers, but it is a dry and thorny 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 115 

lands own, borrow, or share automobiles ; mere clerks and bookkeepers 
jog homeward on their diminutive Haitian ponies ; and chance visitors 
trust to luck and the oily-cushioned wrecks that ply for hire, finishing: 
the journey on foot from the point where the bony and moth-eaten cari- 
cature of a horse refuses longer to respond to the lashings and screams 
of the tar-complexioned driver. Fortunately, it is perfectly good 
form to " catch a ride " with any car-owning member of one's own 
race. 

Let me not leave the impression, however, that the majority of those 
who ascend the city depend on gasolene or horseflesh. At least two 
thirds of them walk, but it is the two thirds that do not count in polite 
parlance. All day long, though far more incessantly, of course, in the 
delightful coolness of early morning or the velvety air of evening, 
processions of black people of varying degrees of raggedness plod 
noiselessly up and down the stony streets of the upper town. Noise- 
lessly, that is, only in their barefooted tread ; their tongues are rarely 
silent, and frequent cackles of unrestrained laughter sound from the 
bundles beneath which their woolly heads are all but invariably buried. 
For be it large or small, a mahogany chest of drawers or a tin can three 
inches in diameter, the Haitian always bears his burdens on his head. 
Her head would be more nearly the exact truth of the case, for the 
women rarely permit their lords and masters to subject themselves to 
the indignity of toil. But the merest child of the burden-bearing sex 
is rarely seen abroad except under a load that gives her the appearance 
of the stem of a toadstool. Some of these uncomplaining females 
serve the more fortunate residents of the hill ; most of them trot to and 
fro between the market and the tiny thatched cabins sprinkled far up 
the range behind the city like rice grains on a green banana leaf. 
Where the streets break up beyond the last man's-size dwellings, nar- 
row trails tunnel on up through the prolific greenery to these scattered 
huts of the real Haitian, among which it is easy to imagine oneself 
in the heart of Africa. 

Five years ago there were barely a score of white men in Port au 
Prince, and not many more than that in all Haiti. To-day there are 
perhaps three hundred American residents, without counting a large 
force of occupation and their families, and to say nothing of a con- 
siderable sprinkling of French, the remnants of what was a flourishing 
German colony until an epidemic of internment fell upon it, and a 
scattering of Italian, Syrian, and similar tradesmen. The Americans 
of the first category are carrying on or opening up new enterprises 



n6 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

that promise to offer Haiti a prosperity not even second to that of 
Cuba. No one who has visited the island can question the extraor- 
dinary fertility of its soil. The overwhelming portion of it is as virgin 
as if the French had never exploited what was once the richest of their 
colonies; revolutions have become, by force majeure, a thing of the 
past. Every new undertaking must, to be sure, be built or rebuilt 
from the ground up. During their more than a century of freedom 
the negoes have done nothing but destroy. They have not even exer- 
cised their one faculty, that of imitation, for they have been too much 
shut off from the rest of the world to find anything to imitate. Though 
the sugar-cane was introduced into Cuba by the French refugees from 
Haiti, the entire country cannot at present compete with the largest 
single sugar-mill in the prosperous island to the west. The Haitian 
laborer has lost all knowledge of the sugar-making process except his 
own primitive method of producing rapadoue. Fie must be taught all 
over again, and he is not a particularly apt pupil ; moreover, complain 
the men who are striving to make Haiti bloom once more with cane, 
no sooner is he taught than the Cuban planters entice him across the 
Windward Passage with wages ten times as high as he receives at home. 
But capital is beginning to recognize that despite its obvious draw- 
backs Haiti offers a rich future, and several syndicates have already 
" got in on the ground floor." 

The American residents of Port au Prince, men, women, and chil- 
dren, swear by it. I have yet to meet one who is eager to leave ; many 
of those who go north for extended vacations cut them short with a 
cry of " take me back to Haiti." To the misinformed northerner its 
very name is synonymous with revolution and sudden death. Outside 
the field of romance there is about as much danger of meeting with 
violence from the natives as there is of being boiled in oil at a church 
" sociable." There is not a deadly representative of the animal or 
vegetable kingdom on the island ; except for some malarial regions of 
rather mild danger the climate is as healthful as that of the best state 
in our union — with due regard, of course, to the invariable rule that 
white women should season their residence with an occasional invigorat- 
ing breath of the north. The Americans have acquired one by one, 
as some yellow politician has lost his grasp on the national treasury, 
the grove-hidden houses in the upper town, some of them little short 
of palatial. There they live like the potentates of the tropical isles 
of romance. The blacks are respectful, childlike in their manner, and 
have much of the docility of the negroes of our South before the Civil 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 117 

War. They work for wages which, as wages go nowadays, are less 
than a song. House servants receive from five to eight dollars a month, 
and the one meal a day to which the masses have long been accustomed 
rarely costs a twenty-cent gourde. Families who could scarcely afford 
the luxury of a single " hired girl " in the land of their birth keep five 
servants in Haiti, a cook, butler, up-stairs maid, laundress, and yard 
boy ; for the Haitian is strictly limited in his versatility, and the cook 
could no more serve a dinner than a laundress could give the yard its 
daily sweeping. They are usually stupid beyond words, with the 
mentality of an intelligent child of six, but they are sometimes capable 
of great devotion, with a dog-like quality of faithfulness; and between 
them all they swathe the existence of their masters in the comfort of an 
old-time Southern plantation. All this is but half the story of content- 
ment with Haitian residence, for the mere fact that the sun is certain 
to break forth in all the splendor of a cloudless sky as sure as the 
morning comes round is sufficient to make the cold and dismal north 
seem a prison by comparison. 

There is a certain amount of friction between the several classes 
of Americans in Port au Prince, not to mention heroic efforts in " keep- 
ing up with Lizzie." Ten-course dinners with all the formality and 
ostentation which go with them are of daily occurrence; "bridge" 
flourishes by day and by night, with far from humble stakes, and dances, 
whether at the American Club or in private houses, are not conspicuous 
for their simplicity. The two things go together, of course ; it is of 
little use to disagree with a man if you cannot prove yourself his 
equal by " putting up as good a front " as he does. Roughly speak- 
ing, our fellow-countrymen in the Haitian capital may be divided into 
four classes, though there are further ramifications and certain points 
of contact. Each class has its own faults and virtues, and comes 
naturally by them. The half dozen civilian officials who hold the chief 
offices of our " advisory " share in the civil government have in too 
many cases been chosen for their political standing rather than for 
their ability or experience in such tasks as that they are facing. The 
navy and the marine officers, between whom a rift now and then shows 
itself, have the characteristics of the military calling the world over. 
They are by nature direct and autocratic, rather than persuasive and 
tactful ; they have an almost childish petulance at any fancied slight 
to their rank, which does not make it easy for them to cooperate with 
the civilian officials. Of their efficiency in their chosen profession there 
is no question, but our policy of assigning them to administrative posi- 



n8 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tions simply because they are already on the national pay-roll and ex- 
pecting them to shine in tasks which call for a lifetime of training 
quite opposite to that they have received has its drawbacks. The very 
qualities which make for success in pacifying the country hamper them 
in dealing with the better class of natives, who are, to be sure, negroes, 
yet who have the sensitive French temperament and are much more 
amenable to persuasion than to bullying. By chance or design the 
great majority of our officers in Haiti are Southerners, and they 
naturally shun any but the most unavoidable intercourse with the 
natives. This is one of the chief bones of contention between the forces 
of occupation and the American civilians engaged in business. The 
latter, while still keeping a color-line, contend that the natives of edu- 
cation should be treated more like human beings. They deplore the 
narrow viewpoint, the indifference to industrial advancement, the occa- 
sional schoolboy priggishness of the officers, and the latter retaliate 
by considering the term business man as synonymous with money- 
grabbing and willingness to cater to the natives for the sake of trade. 
Not that these differences cause open rifts in the American ranks, but 
the atmosphere is always more or less charged with them. The native 
of education, on his side, resents the whole American attitude on the 
race question, and not wholly without reason. The color-line is justifi- 
able in so far as it protects against intermingling of blood, character- 
istics, and habits, but there is a point beyond which it becomes d — d 
foolishness, and that point is sometimes passed by our officers in Haiti. 
After all, the Haitians won their independence without our assistance, 
and to a certain extent they are entitled to what they call their dignite 
personelle. The Southerner is famed for his ability to keep the 
" nigger " down, but he is less successful in lifting him up, and that is 
the task we have taken upon ourselves in Haiti. 

As every American should know, but as a great many even of those 
who pride themselves on keeping abreast of the times do not, Haiti 
has been an American protectorate since the summer of 191 5. There 
is a native government, to be sure, ranging all the ebony way from 
president to village clerks, but if it functions efficiently, and to a certain 
degree it does, it is thanks to a few hundred of our own marines and 
certain representatives of our navy. How this strange state of affairs, 
so contrary to the forgiving spirit of the present administration, came 
about is a story brief and interesting enough to be worth the telling. 

The Spanish discoverers — for one must be permitted a running 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 119 

start if one is to race through the reeking fields of Haitian history — 
soon wiped out the native Indian population in their usual genial, but 
thorough, way. Fields will not plant, or at least cultivate, themselves, 
however, even in so astonishingly fertile a land as the island that 
embraces the republics of Haiti and Santo Domingo. Hence the 
Frenchmen to whom the western end of the island eventually fell, after 
varying vicissitudes, followed the custom of the time and repopulated 
the colony with negro slaves. Prosperity reigned for a century or 
more. There are still jungle-grown ruins of many an old French 
plantation mansion to be found not merely within the very boundaries 
of the Port au Prince of to-day, but in regions that have long since 
reverted to primeval wilderness. Unfortunately, for the French at 
least, the slave-traders supplied this particular market with members of 
some of Africa's more warlike tribes, the descendants of whom, taking 
the theories of the French Revolution au pied de la lettre, concluded to 
abolish their masters. Under a genuine military genius with the blood 
of African chieftains in his veins, one Toussaint l'Ouverture, and his 
equally black successor, Dessalines, the slaves defeated what was in 
those days a large French army, commanded by the brother-in-law of 
the great Napoleon, and drove the French from the island. New 
Orleans and Philadelphia received most of the refugees, whose family 
names are still to be found in the directories of those cities. Except 
for a few persons the French never returned, and Haiti has been 
"the Black Republic " since 1804. . 

The result was about what our Southern statesmen would have 
prophesied. In theory the government of Haiti is modeled on that of 
France; in practice it has been the plaything of a long line of military 
dictators of varying degrees of color and virtually all rising to power 
and sinking into oblivion — usually of the grave — on the heels of 
swiftly succeeding revolutions. There have been a few well-meaning 
men among them, the last of whom, named Leconte, was blown up in 
1912, palace and all. Most of them were interested only in playing 
Caesar, or, more exactly, Nero, over their black fellow-citizens until the 
time came to loot the national treasury and flee, a program which was 
frequently cut short by appalling sudden death. The detailed recital 
of more than a century of violence, of constant bloody differences 
between the mulattoes and the genuine blacks, would be a tale too long 
for the modern reader. 

In 191 5 the presidency was occupied by a particularly offensive black 
brother named Guillaume Sam. Though it has not been so recorded, 



120 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Sam's middle name was evidently Trouble. Foreign war-ships took 
to dropping in on Port au Prince and demanding the payments of 
debts to foreigners. Up in the northern peninsula, as usual in mango- 
time, when the trees of the island constitute a commissary, revolution 
broke out, and, to top off his woes, Sam was busy marrying off his 
daughter and installing her in a new palace. In his wrath at being 
disturbed at such a time Sam passed the word to his chief jailer to 
clean out the penitentiary, some of the political prisoners in which 
were no doubt in sympathy with the revolutionists, but many of whom 
were there merely because they had aroused the personal enmity of 
Sam, or some of his cronies. The sentence was carried out more like 
a rabbit-hunt than an execution. In an orgie in which the primitive 
instincts of the African had full play the two hundred or more prisoners 
were butchered in circumstances better imagined than described. 
Among them were many members of the " best families " of Port au 
Prince. It is not recorded that any of this class took personal part in 
the revenge that followed, but they undoubtedly instigated it. The 
rank and file of the town, those same more or less naked blacks who 
are ordinarily docile and childlike, surrounded the palace. Sam had 
taken refuge in the French legation. For the first time even in the 
turbid history of Haiti, the sanctuary of a foreign ministry was violated 
by the voodoo-maddened mob. Sam was dragged out, cut to pieces, 
and tossed into the bay. Then our marines landed and, to use their 
own words, " the stuff was all over." 

American control is due to continue for at least twenty years from 
that date. A treaty drawn up soon after the landing of our forces, 
and subsequently renewed, provides for the form under which our 
" assistance " shall be exercised, as well as specifying the time limit. 
An American financial adviser, who is far more than that in practice, 
an American receiver of customs, and heads of the engineering and 
sanitation departments, are required by the terms thereof, and the final 
decision in most matters of importance lies with the American minister. 
Unlike the Republic of Santo Domingo in the eastern end of the island, 
Haiti still retains her native government, but its acts are subject to 
a relatively close supervision by the officers above named, despite the 
pretense that our share is only " advisory." 

There are both natives and foreigners who contend that Haiti is 
fully capable of governing itself if the white man will go away and let 
the Black Republic alone. The following incident is not without its 
bearing on the subject: 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 121 

The Rotary Club of Port-au-Prince decided in the fifth year of 
American occupation to assess every member five dollars for the pur- 
pose of providing a community Christmas for the poor children of the 
city. Never had a Christmas-tree been seen in Haiti outside the homes 
of American or other foreign residents. The vast majority of Haitians 
had no conception that so benevolent a being as Santa Claus existed. 

The Port au Prince branch of the club had been very recently organ- 
ized. Its membership included not only the representative business 
men of all grades in the foreign colony, but it had made a special 
point of overlooking the color-line and admitting as many Haitians 
as white men. A little closer intercourse now and then between the 
two races, it was felt, would do no one any harm, and the experience 
of similar clubs in Cuba suggested that it might do considerable good. 
The military colony, of course, took no part in this flagrant violation 
of its strict Southern principles beyond granting its official blessing, but 
the civilians had long contended for a broader-minded attitude. 

There was no difficulty in finding representative Haitians of suffi- 
cient culture to be worthy a place in such an assembly. Men educated 
in Paris, graduates of the best universities in other European capitals, 
men who spoke the French language as perfectly as the French them- 
selves, men who could give the average American business man cards 
and spades in any discussion of art, literature, and the finer things of 
civilization, were to be found in the best Haitian homes. The native 
membership as finally constituted included cabinet ministers, former 
ambassadors to the principal world capitals, lawyers famous for their 
oratory, and men who had produced volumes on profound subjects, 
to say nothing of very tolerable examples of lyric poetry. The club 
did not, it is true, completely obliterate the color-line. It merely moved 
it along. A complete sweep of the crowded table at the weekly club 
luncheons, with whites and Haitians nicely alternating, did not disclose 
a single jet-black face. But that was not the fault of the club; it was 
due to the fact that the benefits of higher education have seldom reached 
the full-blooded Africans of the island, as distinguished from what are 
known locally as the " men of color." 

The wives of the white club members took up the task of providing 
a suitable Christmas where the men left off, and pushed the matter with 
American enthusiasm. They canvassed the white colony for additional 
funds ; they solicited contributions in kind from the merchants of 
Caucasian blood. Their evenings they spent in making things that 
would bring joy to the little black babies, in putting the multifarious 



122 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

gifts in order, in laying new plans to make the affair a success. By 
day they drove about in their automobiles through all the poorer sec- 
tions of the city, distributing tickets to the swarms of naked black 
piccaninnies. Mobs of harmless, clamoring negroes surrounded their 
cars, holding up whole clusters of babies as proof of their right to 
share in the extraordinary generosity of the strange white people. 
Seas of clawing black hands waved about them like some scene from 
Dante's Inferno in an African setting. A tumult of pleading voices 
assailed their ears : " Cartes, mama, donne-moi cartes ! Moi deux petits, 
mama ! Non gagner carte pour petit malade, mama ? " 

The " ladies of color " of the other club members formed a committee 
of their own and lent a certain languid assistance, but the brunt of the 
work fell on the incomprehensibly generous whites. The men of the 
yellow features were even more willing to leave matters to their 
Caucasian associates. The latter were more experienced in the ar- 
rangement of Christmas-trees ; moreover, they could descend to vulgar 
work, which the elite of Port au Prince could not indulge in without 
losing caste. Curious creatures, these whites, anyway; let them go 
ahead and spread themselves. The " men of color " were quite willing 
to sit back and watch les blancs run the whole affair — except in one 
particular, the distribution of tickets. In that they were more than 
ready to cooperate. They even made the generous offer of attending 
to all that part of the affair. The minister of public instruction came 
forward with a plan in keeping with his high rotarian standing. If the 
bulk of the tickets, say two thirds of them, for instance, were turned 
over to him, he would personally accept the arduous labor of distribut- 
ing them to the school-children. Now you must know that the school- 
children of Port au Prince constitute a very small proportion of the 
young population, and that they are exactly the class which the sponsors 
of the Christmas-tree were not trying to reach. Furthermore, do not 
lose sight of the fact that the men of color must be constantly on the 
qui vive to keep their political fences in order. Even the ladies of the 
Haitian committee advised against the minister's proposition. He, 
they whispered, would divide the tickets between his favorite teachers, 
who in turn would distribute them to their pet pupils. 

Meanwhile Christmas drew near. A band of black men were sent 
far up into the mountains to fetch down a pine-tree. They are numer- 
ous in some parts of Haiti, occasionally growing side by side with the 
palms. The blacks could not, of course, understand why they must 
lug a tree for two or three days over perpendicular trails when trees 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI. 123 

of a hundred species abounded in the very outskirts of Port au Prince; 
but this was not the first time they had received absurd orders from 
the incomprehensible blancs. They selected as small a tree as they 
dared and started down the mountain-side. As the wide-spreading 
branches hindered their progress, they lopped most of them off. How 
should they know that the inexplicable white men wanted the branches 
to hang things on? The gentleman of color, right-hand man of their 
great national president, who had transmitted the order to them had 
said nothing about that, nor explained how the branches might be 
bound close against the trunk by winding a rope around them. 

Christmas morning came. Several Americans defied the tropical 
sun to direct the labors of another band of blacks engaged in planting 
a diminutive pine-tree with a few scattered twigs at its top, and to hide 
its nudity beneath another tree of tropical luxuriance, out on the 
glaringly bare Champs de Mars before the grand stand from which 
the elite of Port au Prince watches its president decorate its national 
heroes after a successful revolution. The rotarians of color could 
not, of course, be expected to appear at such a place in the heat of the 
day. 

The ceremony was set for five o'clock, and was expected to last until 
nine. The American Electric Light Company had contributed the il- 
lumination, and its manager had installed the festoons of colored lamps 
in person. The American chief of police had assigned a force of native 
gendarmes to the duty of keeping order. It would be almost their 
first test of handling a friendly crowd in a friendly manner. Hitherto 
their task had been to hunt down their caco fellows with rifle and 
revolver, an occupation far better fitted to their temperament and 
liking. An American of benevolent impulses had consented to play 
Santa Claus, and give the little black urchins a real Christmas, with all 
the trimmings. 

Poor Santa Claus did not get time even to don his whiskers. By 
two the crowd began to gather. By three all the populace of Port au 
Prince's humble sections had massed about the tree which the incom- 
prehensible blancs had planted for the occasion instead of performing 
their strange rites under one of the many live trees with which the city 
abounded. Word had been sent out that full dress was not essential. 
Old women who had barely two strips of rag to hang over their dangling 
breasts, boys whose combined garments did not do the duty of a pair of 
swimming-trunks, had tramped up from their primitive hovels on the 
edges of the city. If they were ragged far beyond the northern mean- 



124 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ing of that term, at least their strings and tatters were as clean as water 
and sun-bleaching could make them. The women and most of the men 
carried or dragged whole clusters of black babies, most of them as 
innocent of clothing as a Parisian statue. As they arrived, the chil- 
dren were herded within the roped inclosure about the tree. Only 
adults with infants in arms were permitted inside the ropes; the jet- 
black sea of small faces was unbroken clear around the wide seething 
circle. It was hard to believe that there were so many piccaninnies 
in the world, to say nothing of the mere half-island of Haiti. Outside 
the ropes an immense throng of adults, mingled with better-dressed 
children without tickets, was shrieking a constant falsetto tumult that 
made the ear-drums of those in the focus of sound under the tree 
vibrate as if their ears were being incessantly boxed. A " conservative 
estimate " set the number present at ten thousand. 

Up to this point the gentlemen of color, even those who had been 
appointed on the original committee, had kindly refrained from inter- 
ference with their more Christmas-experienced white associates — ex- 
cept in the aforementioned matter of tickets. Now they appeared en 
masse to give the distinction of their presence and the sanction of 
their high caste to so praiseworthy an undertaking. Cabinet ministers, 
newspaper editors, the bright lights of the Haitian bar, the very presi- 
dent of the republic, strutted down the human lanes that were opened 
in their honor and took the chief places of vantage on the distributing 
platform beneath the tree. Their dazzling dernier cri garments made 
the simple American committeemen look like the discards of fortune. 
Their features were wreathed in benign smiles. They stepped forth to 
the edges of the platform and waved majestic, benevolent greetings to 
their applauding constituents outside the ropes. Some one handed the 
president a toy horn. He put it to his lips and blew an imaginary blast 
to prove what a bonhomme he was at heart and how thoroughly he 
entered into the prevailing spirit. The other gentlemen of color as- 
sumed Napoleonic poses ; they raised their voices in oratorical cadences, 
and, when these failed to penetrate the unceasing din, they waved their 
hands at the heaps of gifts about them with sweeping gestures that said 
as plainly as if they had spoken in their impeccable French, " See, my 
beloved people, what I, in my bounty, have bestowed upon you ! " 

Soon after four the minister of public works snatched up a bundle 
of presents and flung them out into the sweltering sea of upturned 
little faces. That was neither the hour nor the manner of distribution 
that had been agreed upon, but what should a great political genius 






UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 125 

know of such minor details? Besides, there was no hope of delaying 
the ceremony much longer. The surging throng was in no mood to 
watch the absurd antics of the unfathomable white people, with their 
patched-up tree and their queer ideas of order and equal distribution. 
What they wanted were the presents, and at once. Those behind were 
already climbing over those in front in an effort to get at the heaped-up 
wares. If the original plan of waiting until nightfall and the colored 
lights had been carried out, the gifts would probably have disappeared 
in a general melee. 

The bean geste of the Rotary vice-president was a signal for all his 
yellow confreres to distribute largess to their clamoring constituents. 
In vain did the white women attempt to exchange gifts for tickets, 
according to the system they had worked out. Their kinky-haired 
associates would have no such restrictions. As long as a hand was 
held out to them they continued to thrust gifts into it, perfectly indiffer- 
ent to other hands clutching tickets that were being wildly flourished 
about them. There were presents of every possible usefulness to 
Haitian poverty — shoes, stockings, hats, shirts, suits, collars, ties, 
bales of cloth cut in sizes for varying ages of children's garments, 
candy, toys, food stuffs ranging all the way from cakes to cans of 
sardines. The plan had been to gage each gift by the appearance of 
the recipient. There was nothing particularly Santa Claus-like in hand- 
ing a necktie to a boy who had not shirt enough to which to attach a 
collar, nor in wishing a pair of stockings off on a youth whose feet 
had never known the imprisonment of shoes. Stark-naked black 
babies whose ribs could be counted at a hundred paces were not so 
much in need of an embroidered sailor-blouse as of a tin of biscuits. 
But all this meant nothing to the excited Haitians on the platform. 
They poured out gifts as if the horn of plenty were their own private 
property. The ministers caught up whole armfuls of presents and 
flung them clear over the heads of the invited children into the shrieking 
mobs beyond the ropes. The adults out there were far more likely 
to vote for them at the next elections than were the half -starved urchins 
beneath them. One cabinet member was seen to toss bundle after 
bundle to an extraordinarily tall negro who was known to wield great 
political power among the masses. Meanwhile the helpless little urchins 
within the circle rolled their white eyes in despair and frantically waved 
the tickets clutched in their little black hands, until they went down 
under the bare feet of those fighting forward behind them. 

The native gendarmes in their uniforms so like that of the American 



126 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

marines were preserving order much as the pessimists had predicted. 
One of them, starched and ironed to the minute, approached an Ameri- 
can distributor and asked, with the sweet-faced courtesy of a Southern 
lady of the old school, for one of the riding-whips which some merchant 
had contributed. " Here 's a fine fellow," said the unadorned Santa 
Claus to himself, " a real soldier. He wants a whip to use on mounted 
duty, and so gentle-mannered a chap will make only proper use of it." 
The gendarme accepted the gift with a polite bow and a grateful smile 
and marched back across the ring — to strike full in the face with all 
his force a pitiful old black woman who was being forced forward by 
the crush behind, and to rain blow after blow on her bare head and 
breast and on the naked infant she had brought on the invitation of the 
ticket clutched in its tiny hand. What was the good of protesting? 
He had been ordered to hold back the crowd, and as he had been for- 
bidden to use the revolver strapped at his side, how else could he do so? 
If he had been checked in his onslaught, he would have spent the rest of 
the afternoon wondering what these strange Americans wanted, any- 
way. 

By dint of superhuman exertions the white distributors succeeded in 
exchanging something or other for every ticket. But it was a sadly 
misgifted swarm of children who finally rescued themselves from the 
maelstrom. Tiny tots who had set their hearts on a cake or a package 
of candy held up the neckties they knew no use for with a " Pas bon 
pour moil Donne gateau!" The greatest demand was for shoes. 
" Non, non, papa! soldier, Soulier!" came incessant shrieks from the 
urchins who waved unwelcome gifts before the weary distributors. 
The gentlemen of color had continued to strew armfuls of presents 
upon the throng beyond the ropes. The minister with the lanky con- 
federate had tossed him assorted wares enough to break the back of a 
Haitian donkey — a feat verging on the impossible. When there was 
nothing else left, he flung him several huge native baskets which a lady 
of the committee had loaned for the occasion. These he followed with 
the decorations snatched from the tree. Then he took to unscrewing 
from their sockets the electric light bulbs belonging to the company 
that had contributed the useless illuminations. This was too much 
even for the benevolent-featured man who had been cast for the role 
of Santa Claus. He gathered the slack of the minister's immaculate 
trousers in one hand and set him down out of reach of further tempta- 
tion. 

The festivities were entirely over by the time the blazing-red tropical 



UNDER THE PALM-TREE OF HAITI 127 

sun sank behind the mountainous range to the westward. The throng 
streamed out across the Champs de Mars like a lake of molten lead 
that had long been dammed up and had suddenly broken its dikes. 
Not a scrap even of the tickets that had been canceled by being torn in 
two remained. In Haiti everything has its commercial value. For 
days to come little heaps of these bits of cardboard would be offered 
for sale by the incredibly ragged old women of the more miserable 
market-places, to be made use of the voodoo gods know how. Among 
the last of the gentlemen of color to leave the platform was a pompous 
being resplendent in Port au Prince's most fashionable raiment. He 
was a graduate of the Sorbonne, a political power in the Black Republic, 
an officer of the Rotary Club, and the editor of Haiti's principal news- 
paper. In one hand, which he held half concealed beneath the tails of 
his frock-coat, he grasped a dozen bright-colored hair-ribbons and 
several silk handkerchiefs which he had niched from the basket of 
presents that had been intrusted to him for distribution. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 

THE word caco first appears in Haitian history in 1867. The 
men who took to the bush in the insurrection against President 
Salnave adopted that pseudonym, and nicknamed zandolite 
those who supported the government. The semi-savage insurrection- 
ists, flitting at will through the rugged interior of the country, indiffer- 
ent alike to the thorny jungle and the precipitous mountains, saw in 
themselves a likeness to the Haitian bird which flies freely everywhere, 
and in their opponents a similarity to the helpless caterpillars on which 
it feeds. The two terms have persisted to this day. 

Haiti has never since been entirely free from cacos, though there 
have been occasional short periods when the country has been spared 
their ravages. Let a new president lose his popularity, however, or 
some ambitious rascal raise the banner of revolt, and the bandit- 
revolutionists were quick to flock together, beginning their operations as 
soon as the mangos were ripe enough to furnish them subsistence. 
With the exception of a few ephemeral leaders with more or less of 
the rudiments of education, the cacos are a heterogeneous mob of 
misguided wretches who have been cajoled or forced into revolt by 
circumstances of coercion. Ragged, penniless, illiterate fellows in the 
mass, they gather in bands varying from a score to thousands in 
number, depending on the reputation, persuasiveness, or power of com- 
pulsion of their self-appointed leaders. The latter, though in some 
cases men of standing, are more often as illiterate as their followers. 
Now and again one of them, usually with some Caucasian blood in his 
veins, has personal ambitions either of making himself President of 
Haiti in the long-approved manner, or at least of becoming powerful 
enough to force the Government to appoint him ruler of a province 
or of a smaller district. Others are merely the agents of disgruntled 
politicians or influential " respectable citizens " of Port au Prince or 
others of the larger cities, who secretly supply funds to the active insur- 
rectionists. 

The backwardness and poverty of Haiti are largely due to the con- 

128 





ta 

•d 
a 

c: 







o 







A street in Port au Prince 



>§ 



JLl i.i i.if * LUn.n 



The unfinished presidential palace of Haiti, on New Year's Day, 1920 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 129 

stant menace of these roving outlaws. Travel has often entirely dis- 
appeared from many a trail ; more than one fertile region has been 
left wholly uncultivated and virtually uninhabited because of marauding 
bands of cacos. Cattle, once plentiful throughout the republic, have 
almost wholly disappeared, thanks to the fact that their flesh furnishes 
the chief means of livelihood and their hides the one sure source of 
income for the bandits. The depredations of the cacos have cost the 
Black Republic most of its wealth and the greater share of its worldly 
troubles. 

Some two years after American occupation cacoism took on a new 
life. In perfect frankness it must be admitted that this was partly 
the fault of the Americans. Next to the cleaning up of Port au Prince 
the most important job on hand was the building of roads. If Haiti 
is to take her place even at the tail end of civilization, she must become 
self-supporting — in other words, able to pay her foreign debts, both 
public and commercial. The prosperity of French days, when the 
island exported large quantities of coffee, sugar, and cotton, has as 
completely disappeared under the anarchy of the blacks as have the old 
plantations. What little the country might still export, consisting 
mainly of coffee, could not get down to tide-water for lack of high- 
ways, those which the French built having been wholly overgrown by 
the militant jungle. 

In their eagerness to furnish the country with this first obvious step 
to advancement the forces of occupation resurrected an old French 
law called the corvee. We still have something of the sort in many of 
our own rural districts — the requirement that every citizen shall work 
a certain number of days a year on the roads. But there is a wide 
difference between the public-spirited Americans and the wild black 
men into which the mass of Haitians has degenerated. Neither they 
nor their ancestors for several generations have seen the need of roads, 
at least anything more than trails wide enough along which to chase 
their donkeys. But they probably would have endured the resurrected 
corvee had it been applied in strict legality, a few days' labor in their 
own locality, instead of being carried out with too energetic a hand. 
When they were driven from their huts at the point of a gendarme 
rifle, transported, on their own bare feet, to distant parts of the country, 
and forced to labor for weeks under armed guards, it is natural that 
they should have concluded that these new-coming foreigners with 
white skins were planning to reduce them again to the slavery they 
had thrown off more than a century before. The result was that a 



130 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

certain percentage of the forced laborers caught up any weapon at 
hand and took to the hills as cacos. If they have any definite policy, 
it is to imitate their forefathers and drive the white men from the 
island. One chief announced the program of killing off the American 
men and carrying their women off to the hills. The mass of Haitians 
believe that the world's supply of white men is very limited ; it is beyond 
their conception that there are many fold more of them where these 
came from. Their ancestors drove out the French, and they not 
only did -not come back, but the blacks were never subjected to any 
punishment — at least any their simple minds could recognize as such — 
for their revolt. Why could not a new Toussaint l'Ouverture accom- 
plish the feat over again ? 

Our mistake in the matter has been corrected. The American officer 
who countenanced, if he did not sanction, these high-handed methods 
has gone to new honors on other fields of battle ; the young district 
commanders whose absolute power led them to apply too sternly their 
orders to build roads have returned to the ranks, and the corvee has 
been abolished. But the scattered revolt persists, and in the opinion of 
all but a few temperamentally optimistic residents, either Haitian or 
American, is due to continue for some time to come. That forced labor 
was not the cause of cacoism, for it is in the Haitian blood to turn 
caco; but it made a fertile field of ignorant, disgruntled negroes from 
which the bandit leaders were able to harvest most of their followers, 
and it gave added strength to the chief argument of the rascally leaders 
— the assertion that the Americans had come to take possession of 
Haiti and reestablish slavery. To this day even the foreign companies 
which have no trouble in recruiting labor for other purposes cannot hire 
the workmen needed to build their roads. The thick-skulled native 
countrymen see in that particular task the direct route to becoming 
slaves. 

For more than two years courageous young Americans have been 
chasing cacos among the hills of central and northern Haiti, with no 
other ulterior motive than to give the Black Republic the internal peace 
it has long lacked and sadly needed. All of them are members of our 
Marine Corps, though many of them are in addition officers of the 
Gendarmerie of Haiti, with increased rank and pay. Take care not to 
confuse these two divisions of pacifiers, for the gendarmerie has a 
strong esprit de corps, and a just pride in its own achievements, in 
spite of being still marines at heart. For a long time the native 
gendarmes, of whom twenty-five hundred, officered by marine enlisted 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 131 

men, have been recruited by our forces of occupation, were efficient 
against the bandits only when personally led by Americans. Merely 
to shout the word " Caco ! " has long been sufficient to stampede a 
Haitian gathering of any size. Bit by bit, however, the gendarmes 
have been taught by practical demonstration that they are better men 
than the cacos, and the immediate job of hunting down the bandits is 
gradually being turned over to these native soldiers. American super- 
vision, nevertheless, for years to come will certainly be necessary to 
eventual success. 

Though the world has heard little of it, our caco-hunters have per- 
formed feats that compare with anything done by their fellows in 
France. In fact, their work has often required more sustained courage 
and individual initiative, and has brought with it greater hardships. 
In the trenches at their worst the warrior had the support and the sense 
of companionship of his comrades and a more or less certain commis- 
sary at the rear; if his opponents were sometimes brutal, they clung 
to some of the rules of civilized warfare. In Haiti many a young 
American gendarme officer has set forth on an expedition of long dura- 
tion through the mountainous wilderness, often wholly alone, except 
for three or four native gendarmes, cousins to the cacos themselves, 
sleeping on the bare ground when he dared to sleep at all, subsisting 
on the scanty products of the jungle, his life entirely dependent on his 
own wits, and his nerves always taut with the knowledge that to be 
wounded or captured means savage torture and mutilation, to be fol- 
lowed by certain death. Bit by bit the native gendarmes have been 
trained to fight the cacos unassisted, and three or four of them have 
now reached commissioned rank; but the best of them still require 
the moral support of a white leader, and the energetic American youths 
scattered through the " brush " of Haiti have the future peace of the 
country in their keeping. 

It must be admitted that the cacos do not constitute a dangerous army 
in the modern sense of the word. Their discipline is less than embry- 
onic, their weapons seldom better than dangerous playthings. One rifle 
to five men is the average equipment, and many of these are antiquated 
pieces captured from the French expeditionary force under Leclerc that 
was driven from the island more than a century ago. Some of them 
are of no more use than the cocomacaque, or Haitian shillalah, even 
when their possessors can obtain ammunition. Such cartridges as fall 
into the hands of the cacos are usually wrapped round and round with 
paper to make them fit the larger bore of their ancient guns, and the 



132 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

bullet that comes zigzagging down the barrel is seldom deadly beyond 
two hundred yards. But the possession of a rifle, even one worthless 
as a firearm, is a sign of leadership that carries with it great personal 
pride, and an occasional caco owns a high-powered modern carbine. 
The nlass of them are armed with machetes, rusty swords of the olden 
days, or revolvers even more useless than the rifles. 

The lesser military ranks are not in favor among the cacos. Every 
leader of a band is a general, and usually a major general at that. 
Most of them have been commissioned by the caco-in-chief — on a slip 
of paper scrawled with a rusty pen, or even with a pencil, by the one 
man on his staff who can write a more or less legible hand. These 
'* commissions " all follow the prescribed form which has been stereo- 
typed in Haiti since the days of Dessalines : 

" Liberte Egalite Fraternite 

Republique d'Haiti 

Informe que vous reunissez les conditions et aptitudes voulues — 
Informed that you possess the qualifications and aptitude desired, I 
hereby appoint you general of division operating against the Americans 
and direct that you proceed with your troops to attack " — this or that 
hamlet or village in the hills. The expression " Operant contre les 
americains " is seldom lacking in these scribbled rags, and some of them 
raise the holder to higher dignities than were ever reached by mere 
field marshals on the battle-grounds of Europe. The " commission," 
for instance, of the " Chief of Intelligence " of the caco-in-chief reads 
succinctly, " I name you as chief of the Division of Spies to spy every- 
where " — an order that has at least the virtue of leaving the recipient 
unhampered with that division of responsibility which has been the 
bane of civilized warfare. Incidentally the intelligence system of the 
cacos is their strongest point. Like most uncivilized tribes the world 
over, they have some means of spreading information that makes the 
telegraph and even the radio seem slow and inefficient by comparison. 
An uninformed stranger, reading these highf alutin' " commissions," 
might easily picture the caco " generals " as mightier men than Foch 
and Pershing combined, instead of what they really are, stupid, un- 
educated negroes dressed in the dirty remnants of an undershirt and 
cotton trousers, a discard straw or felt hat with a bit of red rag sewed 
on it as a sign of rank, and armed with a rusty old saber or a revolver 
that has long since lost its power to revolve. 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 133 

The cacos have a mortal fear of white soldiers. Scores of times a 
single marine or gendarme officer has routed bands of a hundred or 
more, killing as many as his automatic rifle could reach in the short 
period between their first glimpse of him and the time it takes the 
ragged " army " to scatter to the four points of the compass through 
thorny undergrowth or cactus-hedges which no white man could pene- 
trate though all the forces of evil were pursuing him. The natives 
cannot " savez " this uncanny prowess of les blancs, and commonly 
attribute it to the sustaining force of some voodoo spirit friendly to the 
white man. This belief is to a certain extent a boomerang, for the 
Haitian gendarmes often fancy themselves immune in the presence of 
a white superior, and more than one of them has bitten the dust because 
he insisted on calmly standing erect, smoking a cigarette, and placidly 
handing cartridges to the marine who lay hugging the ground beside 
him, pumping lead into the fleeing cacos. With a white man along 
how could he be hurt? Up to date at least three thousand bandits 
have been killed as against four Americans, — a major and a sergeant 
who were shot from ambush, and two privates who lost their lives by 
over-confidence. 

Captured correspondence shows what a terrible war is this guerre 
des cacos: 

" The Americans," reads the report of one general de division to his 
superior, " attacked us in force on the night of the I3-I4th. I found 
myself with a shortage of ammunition, but I succeeded in borrowing 
ten carbine cartridges and three revolver bullets and was able to hold 
the situation in hand." As a matter of fact the American " force " 
consisted on this particular occasion of three marines, and the " gen- 
eral " " held the situation in hand " by scurrying away through the 
mountains so fast that it was a week or more before he got any con- 
siderable number of his band together again. 

" I write to tell you," says another great military genius, " that I 
had a cruel battle before Las Cahobas the other day, with one wounded. 
I also tell you that I arrested General Ulysses St. Raisin for being drunk 
and disarmed him. and he is under guard in my camp. Also that 
General Etienne Monbrun Dubuisson had a big battle with the Ameri- 
cans last week and besides having a soldier severely wounded he had 
one delegue taken by the whites." 

The Americans who are striving to bring internal peace to Haiti 
have come to the unanimous conclusion that the mere killing of cacos 
will not wipe out banditism. They have hunted them by every avail- 



134 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

able means, including the use of aeroplanes. The cacos show a whole- 
some terror for the latter, which they call " God's wicked angels " ; they 
have suffered " cruel " losses before the machine-guns of the deter- 
mined American youths who are pursuing them, but they continue their 
cacoism. All efforts are now being bent to two ends — to kill off 
the chiefs and to weed the country of firearms. In the early days 
of the occupation the native caught in possession of a rifle was given 
five years at hard labor, and many of them are still serving sentence, 
though the penalty has recently been reduced to six months. Every 
report of " jumping " a band or a camp of cacos ends now with a regu- 
lar formula in which only the numbers differ : " Killed i general and 2 
chiefs ; captured 9 rifles, 6 swords, 1 1 machetes." 

The tendency of the caco to use his rifle chiefly as ballast to be 
thrown overboard when the appearance of a white soldier gives his 
black legs their maximum speed has helped this weeding out of weapons, 
as the time-honored Haitian custom for opposing warriors to mount a 
prominent hillock and hurl foul-mouthed defiance at their foes has 
raised the scores of American marksmen. Recently an intelligent 
propaganda has been carried on by the gendarmerie to induce the misled 
rank and file to come in and surrender their arms, receiving in exchange 
a small cash equivalent and a card attesting them bons habitants. This 
offer of amnesty, which has already shown gratifying results, is brought 
to the attention of the bandits chiefly through the market-women, who, 
swarming all over Haiti, have always been the chief channel of infor- 
mation for the cacos, with whom they are in the main friendly despite 
having frequently been robbed of their wares by some hungry " army." 
The chief drawback to this plan, however, is a certain lack of team- 
work befween the two corps of caco-hunters. The marines have orders 
to shoot on sight any native carrying a rifle — a perfectly justifiable 
command, since there is no other distinguishing mark between a bon 
habitant and a caco. But the result is that the chief who has deter- 
mined that surrender to the nearest gendarme officer is the better part 
of valor, or the caco " volunteer " who has at last succeeded in eluding 
his own sentries, is forced to wrap his weapon in banana-leaves and 
sneak up to within a few miles of town, hide his firearm, and apply 
at the gendarmerie for a native soldier to protect him while he goes 
to get it. 

In most cases the bandits travel in small groups until called 
together for some projected attack. But more than one permanent 
camp, veritable towns in some cases, has been found tucked away in 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 135 

some mountainous retreat. The latest of these to be destroyed had 
seventy-five houses, a headquarters building (with two hundred chairs), 
a voodoo temple, and a cockpit ; for the caco remains a true Haitian 
for all his cacoism, and will not be separated from his voodoo rites, his 
fighting cock, and his women except in case of direst necessity. 

Of many courageous feats performed by the American youths in 
khaki who are roaming the hills of Haiti one stands out as the most 
spectacular. Indeed, it is fit to rank with any of the stirring warrior 
tales with which history is seasoned from the days of the Greeks to the 
recent World War. Hearing it, one might fancy he was listening to 
a story of the black ages of Haiti when Christophe was ruling his sable 
brethren with bloody hand, rather than to something accomplished a 
bare half-year ago by a persevering young American. 

Charlemagne Masena Peralte was a member of one of the two 
families that have long predominated in the village of Hinche. He was 
what the Haitians call a griffe, a three-fourths negro. The French 
priest with whom he served as choir-boy and acolyte remembers him 
well as " a boy who was not bad, but haughty and quick to take offense." 
When he had learned what the thatched schoolhouse of Hinche had to 
offer, Charlemagne was sent to Port au Prince, where he finished the 
course given by French ecclesiastics. In other words he was a man 
of education by Haitian standards. Like many of the sons of the 
" best families " in Haiti, he decided to go into politics rather than 
pursue a more orderly profession. But politicians are thicker than 
mangos in the Black Republic, and for some reason things did not 
break right for Charlemagne. Wounded in his pride and denied 
his expected source of easy income, he followed the long-established 
Haitian custom in such matters. He gathered a band of malcontents 
and penniless cacos about him and marched against the capital. The 
Government realized the danger and bought Charlemagne off by ap- 
pointing him commandant of an important district. A few years later, 
when a new turn of the political wheel left him again among the " outs," 
he followed the same route to another official position. It got to be a 
habit with Charlemagne to force each succeeding government to appoint 
him to office. 

Finding himself in disfavor with the American occupation, he set 
out to work his little scheme once more. It does not seem to have 
occurred to him that conditions had changed. Captured, and convicted 
of cacoism in October, 19 17, by an American court martial sitting in 



136 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

his native town of Hinche, he was sentenced to five years at hard 
labor. 

A year later, while working on the roads in company with other 
inmates of the departmental prison at Cap Haitien, he eluded his 
gendarme guards and escaped. Taking to the bush, he set out to 
organize a new band of cacos. The corvee, then at its height, jnade 
his task easier. To turn the scales still more in his favor, the large 
gang working on the highway at Dignon, near his home town, had 
not been paid in more than three months, thanks to that stagnation of 
circulation to which quartermaster departments are frequently subject. 
" Come along," said Charlemagne, " and / '11 get you your money," and 
some three hundred disgruntled workmen followed him into the moun- 
tains. 

Within a few months he was signing himself " Chief of the Revolu- 
tionary Forces against the American nation on the soil of Haiti," and 
had gathered several thousand cacos about him. The magic name of 
General Charlemagne spread throughout the island. Every leader of 
a collection of lawless ragamuffiins sought to be " commissioned " by 
him. He appointed more generals than ever did a European sovereign. 
Every lazy black rascal with nothing to lose and everything to gain 
joined his growing ranks. When the simple countrymen would not 
follow him by choice, they were recruited by force. He assassinated 
and punished until his word became law to any one out of reach of gen- 
darme protection. He spread propaganda against the American officers, 
asserted that they had orders to annex the country, and posed as the 
savior of Haiti, calling upon the people to help him drive out the white 
oppressors as their fathers had done more than a century before. 

As a matter of fact, the patriotism of Charlemagne, of which he 
constantly boasted in pompous words, consisted of nothing more or less 
than an exaggerated ego and an overwhelming desire to advance his 
own personal interests. He had that in common with all the yellow 
politicians of Haiti. But he played the patriotic card with unusual 
success. Disgruntled politicians and men of wealth who had some 
personal reason for wishing the occupation abolished gave him secret 
aid. The simple mountain negroes really believed that they were fight- 
ing to free Haiti from the white man, and that under the great General 
Charlemagne the task would soon be accomplished. The corvee hap- 
pened to have been abolished soon after the " general's " escape from 
prison; he quickly took personal credit for the change and promised 
the simple Haitians to free them in the same manner of all foreign 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 137 

interference. Before the end of 1918 he attacked his native town 
with several thousand followers and was not easily repulsed. It was 
decided to put the marines in the field against him, and for eight 
months they pursued him in vain. If anything, the caco situation was 
becoming worse instead of better. Despite the " jumping" of many a 
band and camp by the marines and the gendarmerie, the central portion 
of the country was becoming more and more bandit-ridden. It became 
apparent that the pacification of Haiti depended chiefly on the elimina- 
tion of Charlemagne. 

Herman H. Hanneken was a typical young American who had joined 
the Marine Corps soon after finishing at the preparatory school on the 
corner of Cass and Twelfth streets in his native town of St. Louis. 
After taking part in the Vera Cruz demonstration, he was sent to 
Haiti with the first forces of occupation, in August, 1915. There he 
reached the rank of sergeant, and in due time became in addition a cap- 
tain in the Gendarmerie d'Ha'iti. It was in the latter rather than the 
former capacity that he took part in the little episode I am attempting 
to report, which was strictly an affair of the gendarmerie as distin- 
guished from their brotherly rivals in arms, the marines. 

In June, 1919, Captain Hanneken was appointed district commander, 
with headquarters in the old town of Grande Riviere, famous in 
Haitian military and political annals. A powerful fellow of more than 
six feet, who had reached the advanced age of twenty-five, he was 
ideal material for the making of a successful caco-hunter. Having 
recently returned from leave in the States, however, and his former 
stations having been in peaceful regions, he had little field experience 
in the extermination of bandits. Moreover, his extreme modesty and 
inability to blow his own horn had never called him particularly to the 
attention of the higher officials of the gendarmerie. No one expected 
him to do more than rule his station with the average high efficiency 
which is taken for granted in any of the hand-picked marines who are 
detailed as gendarme officers. 

Captain Hanneken, however, had higher ambitions. Having familiar- 
ized himself in a month with the routine of his district, he found time 
weighing heavily on his hands. He turned his attention to the then 
most pressing duty in Haiti, the elimination of Charlemagne. Unfor- 
tunately for his plans, there were almost no cacos in the district of 
Grande Riviere. He could not encroach upon the territory of his 
fellow-officers ; the only chance of " getting a crack " at the bandits was 
to import some of them into his own region. 



138 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Jean Batiste Conze, a native of Grande Riviere, was a griffe, like 
Charlemagne; he also belonged to one of the "best families" of his 
home town. But there his similarity with the chief of the cacos ceased. 
He had always been a law-abiding citizen, and had once been chief of 
police on his native heath. Like all good Haitians, he realized the 
damage and suffering which the continued depredations of the bandits 
were causing his country. Moreover, he was at a low financial ebb; 
but that is too general a condition in Haiti to call for special comment, 
beyond stating that a reward of two thousand dollars had been offered 
for Charlemagne, dead or alive. 

One night Captain Hanneken asked Conze to call upon him at his 
residence. When he was certain that the walls had been shorn of their 
ears, he addressed his visitor in the Haitian " Creole," which he had 
learned to speak like a native : 

" Conze, I want you to go and join the cacos." 

" 'Aiti, mon capitaine ! " cried Conze, " Moi, toujou' bon habitant, de 
bonne famille, me faire caco?" 

" Exactly," replied Hanneken ; '* I want you to become a caco chief. 
I will furnish you whatever is necessary to gather a good band of 
them about you, and you can take to the hills and establish a camp of 
your own." 

The conference lasted well into the night, whereupon Conze con- 
sented, and left the captain's residence through the back garden in order 
to call as little attention as possible to his visit. A few days later, 
toward the middle of August, he disappeared from town, carrying with 
him in all secrecy fifteen rifles that had once been captured from 
the cacos, 150 rounds of ammunition, several swords, and a showy 
pearl-handled revolver that belonged to Hanneken. He was well 
furnished, too, with money and rum, the chief sinews of war 
among the cacos. With him had gone a personal friend and a trusted 
native gendarme who was forthwith rated a deserter on the captain's 
roster. 

Conze took pains to be seen by the worst native element as he was 
leaving town, among whom he had already spread propaganda calling 
upon them to join him in a new caco enterprise. On the road he held 
up the market-women and several travelers, taking nothing from them, 
but impressing upon them the fact that he had turned bandit. All 
this was reported to Captain Hanneken by his secret police. He told 
them to keep their ears open, but not to worry, that he would get the 
rascal all in good season. One morning a written notice appeared in 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 139 

the market of Grande Riviere. It was signed by Conze and berated the 
commander of the district in violent terms, calling upon the inhabitants 
to join the writer and put an end to his oppression. People recalled 
that Conze and the big American ruler of the town had once had words 
over some small matter. Within three days the talk in all the district 
was of this member of one of Grande Riviere's most prominent 
families who had turned caco. 

Specially favored by his rifles, rum, and apparently unlimited funds, 
Conze soon gathered a large band of real cacos about him. When 
questions were asked, he explained that he had captured the weapons 
from the gendarmerie by a happy fluke, and the wealthy citizens of 
Grande Riviere, disgusted with the exactions of American rule, were 
furnishing him with money. The new army established a camp at 
Fort Capois, at the top of a high hill five hours' walk from Grande 
Riviere. Now and then they made an attack in the neighborhood, 
Conze keeping a secret list of those who suffered serious damage and 
never allowing his men to give themselves over to the drunken pil- 
laging that is so common to caco warfare. The people accounted for 
this by recalling that Conze had always been a more kindly man than 
the average bandit leader. Meanwhile the new chief continued his 
recruiting propaganda. He made personal appeals to those of law- 
less tendency, he induced several smaller bands to join him, he sent 
scurrilous personal attacks on Captain Hanneken to be read in the 
market-place. The law-abiding citizens of Grande Riviere, well aware 
of the advantages of American occupation and fearful of a caco 
raid, appealed to the district commander to drive the new band out 
of the region. Hanneken reassured them in a special meeting of the 
town notables with the assertion that he already had a scheme on 
foot that would settle that rascal Conze. 

At the same time he had as many real worries as the good citizens, 
though of a different nature. The first was a threat by the nearest 
marine commander to wipe out that camp at Fort Capois if the 
strangely laggard gendarme officer did not do so. It would have been 
fatal to Hanneken's plans to take the marines into his confidence; the 
merest whisper of a rumor travels with lightning speed in Haiti. Be- 
sides Conze and his friend the gendarme " deserter," the only per- 
sons whom he had let into the secret were his department commander 
and the chief of the gendarmerie in Port au Prince. Even his own 
subordinate officers were kept wholly ignorant of the real state of af- 
fairs. In spite of this extreme care, he was annoyed by persistent 



i 4 o ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 






rumors that the whole thing was a " frame-up." Conze, ran the 
market-place gossip, was really a zandolite, a " caterpiller " in the 
pay of the Government and the Americans. General Charlemagne, 
stationed far off in the district of Mirebalais, had been warned to look 
out for him, a more or less unnecessary '* tip," since it is natural to 
Haitian chiefs to be suspicious of their fellows. In vain Conze sent 
letters written by his secretary, the " deserted " gendarme, in proper 
caco style — most of them dictated by Hanneken — to the big chief, 
offering the assistance of his growing band. For a month he received 
no reply whatever. Then Charlemagne wrote back in very courteous 
terms, lauding Conze's conversion to the cause of Haitian liberty, but 
constantly putting him off on one polite pretext or another. These 
letters, always sent by women of caco sympathies, were a week or more 
old before the replies came back through devious bandit channels, and 
the situation often changed materially within that length of time, up- 
setting Hanneken's plans. Meanwhile Conze cleared the region about 
him, built houses for his soldiers, and made Fort Capois the talk of all 
the cacos. Each new recruit was given a draft of rum and what 
seemed to him a generous cash bounty, and better food was served than 
most of them had tasted in their lives. Still Charlemagne would have 
nothing to do with him beyond the exchange of polite, non-committal 
notes. 

At length the coco-in-chief sent one of his trusted subordinates to 
report on the situation at Fort Capois. General 'Tijacques marched 
into Conze's camp one evening at the head of seventy-five well-armed 
followers, every man with a shell in his chamber. His air was more 
than suspicious, and he ended by openly accusing Conze of being a 
zandolite. 

" If I am, go ahead and shoot me! " cried the latter, laying aside his 
weapons and ordering his men to withdraw. 'Tijacques declined the 
invitation, but all night long he and his men sat about the fire, their 
weapons in their hands, while Conze slept with the apparent innocence 
of a babe. When morning broke without an attack upon him, 'Ti- 
jacques was convinced. He kissed Conze on both cheeks, complimented 
him on joining the " army of liberation," and welcomed him as a 
brother in arms. When Conze presented him with a badly needed 
suit of clothes, a still more desired bottle of rum, and money enough 
to pay his troops a week's salary of ten cents each, he left avowing 
eternal friendship. 

A day or two later Charlemagne sent another of his generals, Papil- 






THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 141 

Ion, on a secret mission to arrest Conze and bring him to his own 
camp. It was -merely a lucky coincidence that Hanneken had decided 
on that very night to " attack " Fort Capois, as he had already done 
several times before. Conze, who made three nightly journeys a week 
to Grande Riviere on the pretext of getting more money from the in- 
habitants friendly to his cause, and entered Hanneken's house through 
the back garden, was instructed how to conduct himself in the affair 
to avoid personal injury. For all that, the American had hard work 
to keep his gendarmes from wiping out the camp entirely. In the 
midst of the fighting he slipped aside in the bushes and, smearing his 
left arm with red ink, wrapped it up in a bandage generously covered 
with the same liquid. Then he sounded the retreat, and the gendarmes 
fell back pell-mell on Grande Riviere. The next morning the market- 
place was agog with the astonishing news. The cacos of Fort Capois 
had repulsed the gendarmes ! Moreover, the great Conze himself 
had wounded the redoubtable American captain ! It would not be 
long before the bandits descended on Grande Riviere itself! Some of 
the frightened inhabitants seized their valuables and fled to Cap Hai- 
tien. 

For days Captain Hanneken wandered disconsolately about the 
town with his arm in a sling. When his own officers or friends joggled 
against it by accident, he cried out with pain. His greatest difficulty 
was to keep himself from being invalided to the rear, or to keep the 
solicitous marine doctor from dressing his wounds. News of the 
great battle quickly reached Charlemagne. Meanwhile the agent he 
had sent to arrest Conze met 'Ti Jacques on the trail. 

" You 're crazy ! " cried the latter when Papillon whispered his or- 
ders. " Conze is as sincere a caco as you or I. I will myself return to 
Charlemagne and tell him so." 

The report of 'Ti Jacques, added to the news that Conze had wounded 
the accursed American commander, as well as repulsing his force, 
won the confidence of Charlemagne — with reservations, of course; 
he never put full confidence in any one, being too well versed in Haitian 
history. He invited Conze to visit him at his headquarters. There he 
commissioned him u General Jean," thanked him in the name of Haitian 
liberty, and promised to cooperate with him. Incidentally, he relieved 
him of the pearl-handled revolver that had once belonged to their com- 
mon enem$r, Hanneken. It was too fine a weapon to be carried by 
any one but the commander-in-chief, he explained. Before they parted, 
he promised the new general to join him some day in Fort Capois. 



142 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Meanwhile the "deserted" gendarme had joined Charlemagne's 
forces and had so completely won his confidence that he was made his 
private secretary. He found means of reporting conditions and plans 
now and then to Hanneken. Conze and Charlemagne entered into 
correspondence in planning a general attack on Grande Riviere. Here 
Hanneken well knew that he was playing with fire. If anything went 
wrong and Grande Riviere was taken, nothing could keep the cacos 
out of Cap Ha'itien, the second city of Haiti and the key to all the 
northern half of the country. Besides, how could he be sure that his 
agents were not "double-crossing" him instead of Charlemagne? 

Negotiations continued all through the month of October. Toward 
the end of that month Charlemagne, his brother St. Remy Peralte, 
several other generals, and many chiefs arrived at Fort Capois, bring- 
ing with them twelve hundred bandits. In company with " General 
Jean " they planned a concerted attack on Grande Riviere. At the same 
time the programs of two other assaults, on the towns of Bahon and 
Le Trou, were set for the same date. The chief value of the latter 
was that they would keep the marines busy and leave the larger town 
to the protection of the gendarmes. 

Charlemagne's forces were to approach Grande Riviere from the 
Fort Capois side and to charge across the river when they received 
the signal agreed upon. Conze's men were to descend upon the city 
from the opposite direction, and " General Jean " was to give the signal 
himself by firing three shots from an old ruined fortress above the town. 
As it was well known that Charlemagne never attacked personally with 
his troops, but hung back safely in the rear, it had been arranged 
through Conze that he await events at a place called Mazaire and enter 
the city in triumph after the news of its capture had been brought to 
him. 

On the night set, the last one of October, Captain Hanneken ordered 
ten picked gendarmes to report at his residence. With them was his 
subordinate, Lieutenant William R. Button, who had just been let 
into the secret. The doors guarded against intrusion, Hanneken told 
the gendarmes to lay aside their uniforms and put on race-like rags 
that had been gathered for the occasion. The two Americans dressed 
themselves in similar garments and rubbed their faces, hands, and such 
portions of their bodies as showed through the tatters, with cold cream 
and lamp-black. Then the detail sallied forth one by one, to meet 
at a place designated, where rifles that had been secretly conveyed there 
were issued to them. 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 143 

The pretended cacos took up their post at Mazaire behind a bushy 
hedge along which Charlemagne must pass if he kept his rendezvous. 
While they lay there, Conze and his following of real cacos, some seven 
hundred in number, passed close by them on their way to attack Grande 
Riviere. This had been reinforced with a large number of gendarmes 
and a machine-gun manned by Americans under the personal command 
of the Department Commander of the North, all barricaded in the 
market-place facing the river. Conze gave the preconcerted signal, and 
Charlemagne's army dashed out of the foot-hills toward the stream. 
It was only the over-eagerness of the barricaded force, which failed 
to hold its fire long enough, that made the caco casualties number 
merely by the dozen rather than by the hundred. 

At the height of the battle Charlemagne's private secretary, the " de- 
serted " gendarme, crawled up to Hanneken and informed him that the 
caco-in-chief had changed his mind. With his extraordinary gift of 
suspicion, he had smelled a rat. He would not come down to Mazaire 
until the actual winner of the battle came to him to announce the cap- 
ture of Grande Riviere. 

To say that Captain Hanneken received the news quietly is merely 
another way of stating that he is not a profane man. Here he had 
planned and toiled for four months to do away with the arch caco and 
break the back of the rebellion that was holding up the advancement 
of Haiti, only to have all his plans fail through the over-suspicion of 
the outlaw politician. He had run the risk of having the headquarters 
of his district captured, with dire, far-reaching results that no one 
realized better than himself. He had played the part of a dime-novel 
hero, descended to the role of an actor, which his forceful, straight- 
forward nature detested, only to be left the laughing-stock of his fel- 
low-officers of the gendarmerie, to say nothing of the "kidding" Ma- 
rine Corps, in which he was still a sergeant. Incidentally, he had 
staked the plan to the extent of eight hundred dollars of his own money, 
which there was no hope of recovering through the devious channels 
of official reimbursement if that plan failed, though as a matter of fact 
this latter detail was the least of his worries. It was not a question of 
a few paltry dollars, but of success. 

If all these thoughts passed through his head as he lay concealed 
in the bushes with his dozen fake cacos, they passed quickly, for his 
next command came almost instantly. It was by no means the first 
time in this hide-and-seek game with Charlemagne that he had been 
forced to change his plans completely on the spur of the moment. 



144 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

" Button," he whispered, " we will be the successful caco detachment 
that brings the news of the capture of Grande Riviere to Charlemagne." 

Led by Jean Edmond Frangois, the " deserted " gendarme and private 
secretary of the raco-in-chief, the little group set out into the moun- 
tains. Charlemagne, said the secretary, had come a part of the way 
down from Fort Capois, but had camped for the night less than half- 
way to the town. It was nearing midnight. Heavy clouds hung low 
in the sky, but the stars shone here and there through them. For 
three hours the detail "stumbled upward along a difficult mountain 
trail. Neither of the Americans knew how soon the gendarmes would 
lose their nerve and slip off into the night, frightened out of all dis- 
cipline by the dreaded name of Charlemagne. There was no positive 
proof that they were not themselves being led into an ambuscade, and 
they knew only too well the horrible end that would befall two lone 
Americans captured by the bandits. To make matters worse, Button 
was suffering from an acute attack of his old malaria, though he was 
too much a marine and a gendarme officer to let that retard his steps. 

The detachment was halted at last by a caco sentry, who demanded 
the countersign. It happened that night to be " General Jean," in 
honor of Charlemagne's trusted — with reservations — ally, Conze. 
Frangois, the " deserted " gendarme, gave it. The sentry recognized 
him also as the private secretary of the great chief. He advanced him, 
but declined to let the detail with him pass without specific orders from 
Charlemagne. The secretary left his companions behind and hurried 
on. 

The disguised gendarmes mingled with the caco outpost and an- 
nounced the capture of Grande Riviere, adding that the population was 
eagerly waiting to receive the great Charlemagne and his doughty war- 
riors. Shouts of triumph rose and spread away into the night. In 
all the years of American occupation no town of anything like the size 
of Grande Riviere had ever been taken by the cacos. It was the death- 
knell of the cursed whites, who would soon be driven from the great 
Republic of Haiti, as they had been many years before. 

Nearly an hour after his departure the secretary returned, to report 
that Charlemagne had ordered the detachment to come to him im- 
mediately with the joyful news. 

" But," added Frangois, " there are six series of outposts between 
here and Charlemagne's headquarters. There is n't a chance in the 
world that we can pass them all without being detected, and cacos 
swarm everywhere along the trail. It is a question of turning back, 




A Haitian country home 




WPS 
A small portion of one collection of captured caco war material 





■ ' "-'^. , - „ 4 




a 
U 




a 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 145 

mon Capitaine, or of leaving the trail and sneaking up over the moun- 
tain through the brush." 

" And lose ourselves for good and all," added Hanneken, in his ready 
" creole." " Nothing doing. Take the lead and keep to the trail." 

The first outpost advanced the detachment without question. The 
score of negroes who made it up seemed to be too excited with the tak- 
ing of Grande Riviere to be any longer suspicious. Some five minutes 
later the group was again halted, this time by an outpost of some forty 
men. Their leader scrutinized the newcomers carefully one by one 
as they passed, the latter, in turn, shuffling along with bowed heads, 
as if they were completely exhausted with the climb from Grande 
Riviere, which was not far from the truth. Several of the bandits along 
the way were heard to remark in their slovenly " creole," " Bon dieu, 
but those niggers are sure tired." The third and fourth outposts gave 
the party no trouble, beyond demanding the countersign, except that 
casual questions were flung at them by the cacos scattered along the 
trail. These the disguised gendarmes answered without arousing sus- 
picion. Perfectly as he knew " creole," Hanneken avoided speaking 
whenever possible, and left the word to Frangois, fearful of giving him- 
self away by some hint of a foreign accent or a mischosen word from 
the southern dialect, with which he was more familiar. No white 
man, whatever his training, can equal the slovenly, thick-tongued pro- 
nunciation of the illiterate Haitian. 

At the fifth outpost the leader was a huge, bulking negro as large 
as Hanneken, and he stood on the alert, revolver half raised, as the 
detail approached. The giving of the countersign did not seem to 
satisfy him. He looked Hanneken up and down suspiciously and 
asked him a question. The captain, pretending he was out of breath, 
mumbled an answer and stalked on. It happened to be -his good luck 
that he is blessed with high cheek bones and a face that would not be 
instantly recognized as Caucasian on a dark night. Button, on the 
other hand, seemed to arouse new suspicion. He was carrying an 
automatic rifle and, in order to conceal the magazine, bore it vertically 
across his chest, his arms folded over it. The negro sentry caught 
the glint of the barrel and snatched Button by the arm. 

" Where did you get such a fine-looking rifle ? " he demanded. 

Hanneken, scenting trouble, had halted several paces beyond, his 
hands on the butts of the revolver and the automatic which he carried 
on his respective hips. It would have been easy to kill the suspicious 
negro, but that would have been the end of his hopes of reaching 



146 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Charlemagne — and probably of the two Americans. For though the 
disguised gendarmes were all armed with carbines, they would have 
been no match for the swarms of cacos about them, even if their taut 
nerves did not give way in flight under the strain. 

Button, however was equal to the occasion. 

" Let me go ! " he panted, jerking away from the negro leader. 
"Don't you see that my chief is getting out of sight?" 

The black giant, still suspicious, yielded with bad grace, and the 
Americans hurried on. The sixth outpost was the immediate guard 
over Charlemagne, about thirty paces from where he had spread his 
blanket for the night. Frangois gave the countersign, took two or three 
steps forward, whispered in Hanneken's ear, " he is up there," and 
slipped away into the bushes. The gendarmes had likewise disap- 
peared. The Americans advanced to within fifteen feet of a faintly 
blazing camp-fire. On the opposite side of it a man stood erect, his 
silk shirt gleaming in the flickering light. He was peering suspiciously 
over the fire, trying to recognize the newcomers. A woman was 
kneeling beside the heap of fagots, coaxing it to blaze. A hundred or 
more cacos were lined up to the right, at a respectful distance from the 
peering chief. 

Two negroes, armed with rifles, halted the Americans, at the same 
time cocking their pieces. Hanneken raised his black, invisible auto- 
matic and fired at the chief beyond the fire, at the same time shouting-, 
" Let her go, Button ! " in an instant the kneeling woman scattered the 
fire with a sweeping gesture and plunged the spot in darkness. But- 
ton was spraying the line of cacos to the right with his machine-gun. 
The disguised gendarmes came racing up and lent new legs to the flee- 
ing bandits. When a space had been cleared, Hanneken placed his 
handful of soldiers in a position to offset a counter-attack, and began 
groping about the extinguished fire. His hands encountered a dead 
body dressed in a silk shirt. This, however, was no proof that his mis- 
sion had been accomplished. Some of Charlemagne's staff" might have 
boasted silk shirts, also. He ran his hands down the body to a holster 
and drew out the pearl-handled revolver which he had loaned to Conze, 
and which had been appropriated in turn by Charlemagne. The caco- 
in-chief had been shot squarely through the heart. 

When daylight came, the hilltop was found to be strewn with the 
bodies of nine other bandits, while trails of blood showed that many 
more had dragged themselves off into the bushes. Among the wounded, 
it was discovered later, was St. Remy, the brother of Charlemagne, 



THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE 147 

who afterward died of his wounds. The captured booty included nine 
rifles, three revolvers, two hundred rounds of ammunition, seven swords, 
fifteen horses and mules, and Charlemagne's voluminous correspon- 
dence. This latter was of special value, since it contained the names 
of the good citizens of Port au Prince and the other larger cities who 
had been financing the caco-'m-chiet. Most of them are now languish- 
ing in prison. But let me yield the floor to Captain Hanneken's of- 
ficial diary of ,the events that followed. Its succinctness is suggestive 
of the character of the man: 

Nov. 1, 1919.— Killed Charlemagne Peralte, Commander-in-Chief of the 
bandits. Wounded St. Remy Peralte. Brought Charlemagne's body to Grande 
Riviere, arriving 9 a. m. Went to Cap Haitien with the body. Received orders 
to proceed to Fort Capois next morning. Went to Grande Riviere via handcar, 
arriving 9 p. m. Wrote report re death of Charlemagne. Left Grande Riviere 
with seven gendarmes, via handcar to Bahon, arriving midnight. 

Nov. 2. — Left Ballon 1 a.m. with seven gendarmes. Arrived 200 yards from 
first outpost of Fort Capois at 5 a. m. Crawled to 150 yards from outpost and 
remained there until 6 130 a. m., waiting for detachment from Le Trou to attack 
at daybreak, when six bandits came in our direction. Opened fire, killing three. 
All bandits in various outposts retreated to main fort. Advanced and captured 
the first, second, and third outposts. Got within 300 yards of fort when they 
opened fire from behind a stonewall barricade. They fired a cannon and about 
40 rifle shots. Crawled on our stomachs, no cover. Fired the machine gun and 
ordered the gendarmes to advance 15 yards and open fire. Kept this up until 
we arrived within 150 yards, when we espied the bandits escaping. Entered fort, 
burned all huts and outposts. Left Fort Capois at 9 a. m. Arrived in Grande 
Riviere 2 p. m., very tired. 

The most exacting military superior cannot but have excused this 
last somewhat unmilitary remark. Fatigue does not rest long on 
Captain Hanneken's broad shoulders, however, and he soon had his 
district cleared again of the cacos he had imported for the occasion. 
The two-thousand-dollar reward was divided between Conze and his 
one civilian assistant. Captain Hanneken, Lieutenant Button, and the 
gendarmes who accompanied them, were ordered to Port au Prince to 
be personally thanked by the President of Haiti and decorated with 
the Haitian medaille d'honneur, a ceremony against which the captain 
protested as a waste of time that he could better employ in hunting 
cacos. At this writing he is engaged again in his favorite sport in 
another district. His Marine Corps rank has been raised to that of 
second lieutenant, while Conze has been appointed to the same grade 
in the Gendarmerie d'Haiti, with assignment to plain-clothes duty. 

The death of Charlemagne has probably broken the back of cacoism 



148 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

in Haiti, though it has been by no means wiped out. Papillon, with 
'Ti Jacques and several other rascals as chief assistants, is still roaming 
at large in the north, and the youthful Benoit is terrorizing the moun- 
tainous region in the neighborhood of Mirebalais and Las Cahobas. 
But the gendarmerie, assisted by the Marine Corps, may be trusted to 
bring their troublesome careers to a close all in good season. One of 
the chief problems of the pacifiers at present is to convince the ignorant 
caco rank and file that the great Charlemagne is dead. His supersti- 
tious followers credit him with supernatural powers, and many a cap- 
tured bandit, when asked who is now his commander-in-chief, still 
replies with faithful simplicity, " Mais, c'est Charlemagne." The 
public display of his body at Grande Riviere and Cap Haitien produced 
an effect that will not soon be forgotten by those who witnessed it, 
but even that has not fully convinced the cacos hidden far away in the 
mountains. So great was the veneration, or, more exactly, perhaps, 
the superstition, in which he was held that it was found necessary to 
give him five fake funerals in as many different places, as a blind, 
and to bury his body secretly in the out-of-the-way spot, lest his grave 
become a shrine of pilgrimage for future cacos. 



CHAPTER VII 

HITHER AND YON IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 

OF many journeys about Haiti, usually by automobile and in 
the company of gendarme officers, the first was to the caco- 
infested district of Las Cahobas. A marine doctor bound on 
an inspection trip there had a seat left after his assistant and a native 
gendarme had been accommodated. Among the four of us there were 
as many revolvers and three rifles, all ready for instant action. One 
can, of course, hire private cars for a tour of Haiti, but quite aside from 
the decided expense, a Haitian chauffeur under military orders is much 
to be preferred to one who is subject to his own whims ; moreover, 
there is much more to be seen and heard in gendarme company, and, 
lastly, if one chances to " pop off " a caco, there is not even the trouble 
of explaining, for one's companions will do that in their laconic report 
to headquarters. 

There are few roads in the West Indies as crowded as that broad new 
highway across the plain which is a continuation of the wide main 
street of Port au Prince. By it all traffic from the north and west 
enters the capital. The overwhelming majority of travelers are market- 
women, most of them barefooted and afoot, but a large number are 
seated sidewise on their donkeys or small mules, balancing on their 
toes the slippers, which are never known to fall off under any provo- 
cation. Pedestrians carry their invariably heavy and cumbersome loads 
on their heads, the haughtier class in crude saddle-bags, and the sight 
of this river of jogging humanity, often completely filling the broad 
highway as far as it can be seen in the heat-hazy distance, is one of 
which we never tired as often as we rode out through it. 

At the time of the outbreak against the French the population 
roughly was made up of thirty thousand whites, as many " people of 
color," and four hundred and fifty thousand blacks. There has been, 
of course, no census since that time, but signs indicate that Haiti has 
now two and a half million inhabitants, for however unproductive the 
semi-savage hordes may be in other ways, they are diligent in the 
process of multiplication. White people are more rare to-day, even if one 
count our forces of occupation, than before the revolt, the mixed race 

149 



150 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

has not greatly increased, so that fully nine tenths of the population 
are full-blooded Africans. Close observers are convinced that, thanks 
mainly to the constant revolutions, there are three females to every 
male, and of the latter a considerable number are now roaming the 
hills of the interior as cacos. Furthermore, the men take little part in 
selling the country produce. The result is that the stream of humanity 
pouring into the capital is almost entirely made up of jet-black women 
and girls. 

The throng was particularly dense on the morning of our journey to 
Las Cahobas, for it was Friday, and the great weekly market in Port 
au Prince begins at dawn on Saturday morning. An American once 
stationed himself at the typical negro arch of triumph, straddling the 
entrance from the Cul-de-Sac to the capital, and counted thirty thou- 
sand travelers in an hour, of whom all but about two hundred were 
market-women. They were somewhat less multitudinous during our 
stay in Haiti, for the Americans had recently set a maximum scale of 
prices for food-stuffs, and many of the women had gone on strike and 
refused to bring their produce to town. They had another grievance in 
the requirement to sell most things by weight. For generations they 
had sold only by the " pile," consisting of three articles of such things 
as eggs, plantains, yams, and the like, or of tiny heaps in the case of 
grains and similar produce ; few of them, moreover, could afford to 
buy scales, and they resented the right given purchasers to appeal to 
gendarmes stationed in the market-places for the verifying of weights. 
But only those who had seen it under still more crowded conditions 
would have realized that the highway was not thronged to its full 
density on this particular morning. 

Through the main street, out past the only modern sugar-mill in 
Haiti, for miles across the plain, our constantly honking Ford plowed 
through this endless procession of black humanity, casting it aside in 
two turbulent furrows of donkeys, mules, women, and multifarious 
bundles. There is nothing more amusing, and pathetic, too, than the 
behavior of the primitive masses of Haiti before an automobile. This 
is scarcely to be wondered at in a country where any wheeled traffic 
except a very rare ox-cart crawling along on its creaking and wobbling 
wheels was unknown up to a few years ago, and where the half-dozen 
automobiles of Port au Prince could not make their way into the coun- 
try until the Americans had begun the reconstruction of the roads. 
But it is proof, too, of the close relationship of the Haitians to their 
savage brethren in central Africa. Just like this, one can easily imag- 






IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 151 

ine, the latter would act at the sudden apparition of a strange machine 
which the great mass of Haitians firmly believe is run by voodoo spirits 
devoted to the white man. 

The highway, like most of those the Americans have built, is of 
boulevard width, and there is ample room for even such a throng as 
this to pass an automobile in safety. But the primitive-minded natives 
are terror-stricken at sight of one bearing down upon them. The 
mounted women invariably tumble off their animals and fall to beating, 
pushing, and dragging them to the extreme edge of the road, at the 
same time shrieking as if the Grim Reaper had suddenly appeared be- 
fore them with his sickle poised. The pedestrians succumb to a similar 
panic, so that the journey out the flat highway presents a constant vista 
of dismounting women and a turmoil of animals and frightened human 
beings tumbling over one another in their excited eagerness to get well 
out of reach of the swiftly approaching demon of destruction. Farther 
on, where the road begins to wind, and the cuts into the hills are often 
deep, the scene is still more laughter-provoking, for the startled animals 
invariably bury their noses in the sheer road-banks and will not, for all 
the cajolery or threats in the world, swing in sidewise along them. If 
they are donkeys, the women pick up their hind quarters and lift them 
out of the way by main force ; when they are too large for this cou- 
rageous treatment, the riders put a shoulder to the quivering rumps, 
abandon those useless tactics to drag at the halters as the machine 
draws nearer, and finally bury their faces also in the bank, as if to 
shut out the horrible experience of seeing their precious animals muti- 
lated beyond recognition. 

Still more distracting to drivers is the behavior of persons approached 
from the rear. A horn is of little use in this case. The Haitian's 
hearing is acute enough, but his mind does not synchronize in its vari- 
ous faculties ; he is aware of a disagreeable noise behind him, but that 
noise does not register as a warning of danger and a call for action. 
Then, when at last he realizes that it means something and is addressed 
to him, or when the bumper or fender touches his ragged coat-tail, he is 
electrified into record-breaking activity. Unfortunately, his psychology 
is that of the chicken, and in eight cases out of ten he darts across the 
road instead of withdrawing to the side of it. This happens even when 
he is far out of danger at the edge of a wide street or highway, and 
every automobile trip through the crowded parts of Haiti is a constant 
succession of interweaving pedestrians bent on getting to the opposite 
side of the road. 



152 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

An American estate manager who drives a heavy car at a high rate 
of speed, yet who is noted for his freedom from accidents, was bowling 
alone one September afternoon far out in the country. The road was 
twenty-two feet wide, and he was driving to the right of it, without an 
animate object in sight except for one ragged countryman plodding 
along the extreme left in the same direction. Seeing no reason to do so, 
he did not blow his horn. Suddenly the pedestrian caught sight of the 
car out of the tail of an eye and darted across the road. The machine 
struck him squarely and knocked him, as was afterward proved by 
measurement, fifty-two feet, then ran completely over him. The driver 
hurried him back to a hospital, where it was found that the only injuries 
he had sustained were a few minor bruises and a gash on the head. 
This was treated, and a few days later he was discharged, and returned 
to his hut, where he died the next week of blood poisoning caused by 
the native healer whom he insisted on having redress his almost healed 
wound. 

Though somewhat stony and grown with an ugly, thorny vegetation, 
the great Cul-de-Sac plain is noted for its fertility. Here the aborigines 
cultivated cotton and tobacco ; at the time of French expulsion it had 
nearly seven thousand plantations, chiefly of sugar-cane, which was 
brought to Haiti from the Canary Islands early in the sixteenth cen- 
tury. The French had covered it with a thorough irrigation system, 
with a grand bassin in the hills above and streams of water spreading 
from it like the fingers of the hand to all parts of the plain. There 
were numerous splendid highways between towns and estates, and the 
ninety thousand acres were dotted with fine residences, hundreds of 
sugar-mills, and many coffee, cotton, and indigo works. To-day the 
roads which our forces of occupation, or the two American companies 
that are beginning to reclaim some of the plain, have not found time 
to restore are rutty successions of mud-holes so narrowed by ever- 
encroaching vegetation as to resemble the trails of blackest Africa, or 
have disappeared entirely. There are a few rude bridges, usually 
patched upon the crumbling remains of once fine French structures, but 
as a rule streams are forded. Except where the newcomers have 
constructed new ones, the saying in Haiti is, " Never cross a bridge if 
you can go around it." Many of the former estates are completely 
overgrown with brush and broken walls, trees rise from former 
courtyards, the remnants of once sumptuous halls are the haunts of 
bats, night birds, and lizards. In some of the less dilapidated ruins 
negro families now cluster; most of them live in shanties patched to- 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 153 

gether of jungle rubbish, their only furnishings a sleeping-net and a 
German enamelware pot. Whatever else he lacks, the Haitian always 
has the latter, its holes stopped with corncobs until they become too 
large, when the pot is filled with earth, planted with flowers, and set up 
in a conspicuous position about the hovel. Everywhere are to be found 
reminders of the prosperous days when Haiti was France's richest 
colony. Large, semispherical iron sugar-kettles, rusted, broken, and 
full of holes, lie tumbled everywhere along the highway and across the 
plain. Old French bells bearing pre-Napoleonic dates and quaint in- 
scriptions, ruined stone aqueducts, mammoth grass-grown stairways, 
rust-eaten machinery, inexplicable stone ruins of all shapes and sizes, 
are stumbled upon wherever the visitor rambles. 

The characteristic sour stench of a dirty little sugar- and rum-mill 
only rarely assails the nostrils. The natives have lost not only the 
energy, but almost the knowledge, required for the growing and making 
of sugar, producing only rapadoue, dark -brown lumps of crude, coagu- 
lated molasses, which, wrapped in leaves, are to be found in every 
Haitian market. The American companies found the people so igno- 
rant of agricultural methods that it was impossible to introduce the 
colono system. The men and women who work in the sugar- and 
cotton-fields of these new enterprises are as patched and ragged a crew 
as can be found on the earth's surface. The average daily wage for 
adult male laborers in Haiti is a gourde, or twenty cents, a day, women 
and boys in proportion. The new companies have raised this to thirty 
cents. In theory the laborers are fed by their employers, but it would 
be considerable exaggeration to call the one gourdful of rice-and-bean 
hash which a disheveled, yet dictatorial, old negro woman was dishing 
out to each of a long line of gaunt and soil-stained workmen on one 
of the estates at which we stopped one evening the nourishment needed 
for a long day in the fields. Except for a sugar-cane, a lump of 
rapadoue, or possibly a bit of rice or plantain, which they find for them- 
selves in the morning, this is the only food of the Haitian field laborer. 
So lazy have they become in their masterless condition that this one 
meal a day has come to be the habitual diet of the masses and all they 
expect of their employers; but the impression on both sides that this 
is all they need is probably costing the companies more in lack of 
efficient labor than they themselves realize. Only at one season during 
the year does the average Haitian get more than these slim pickings; 
that is in mango-time, and then the roads and trails are carpeted with 
the yellow pits. 



154 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Dusty, thorny, and hot, the Cul-de-Sac plain continued as level as the 
sea at its edge to where we began to climb the steep slope of wrinkled, 
rusty mountains shutting it off abruptly on the north and offering a 
panorama of rare beauty from Port au Prince, particularly when sun- 
rise or sunset gives them a dozen swiftly changing colors. As we rose 
above it, the reedy edged first of two large lakes, one of which stretches 
on into the Republic of Santo Domingo, broke the red-brown carpet 
with a contrasting shimmer of blue at the eastern end, and the moun- 
tains behind the capital stood forth in silhouette against the transparent 
tropical sky. The aboriginal name " Haiti " means a high and moun- 
tainous land ; like its inhabitants, its scenery and vegetation are more 
savage than those of Cuba. So steep was the new road climbing di- 
agonally up the face of the range that we were twice compelled to dis- 
mount and call upon a gang of road laborers to push the machine 
over the next stony rise. The stream of market-women continued to 
pour down this in cascades. Many of the heavy black faces would have 
made splendid gargoyles. Almost all of the women wore gowns of 
blue denim ; the year before, the driver said, they had all worn purple, 
but the style had changed only in color. Once we met a lone marine, 
and higher up paused at a camp where there were several of them. 
But they were not the spick-and-span " leather-necks " we know taking 
their shore leave along Broadway. They wore only the indispensable 
parts of their uniforms, on the faces of those old enough to produce it 
was a week's growth of beard, and they clutched their rifles with the 
alert and ready air of expecting to use them at any moment, for we 
were now entering a region constantly harassed by cacos. 

We grasped our own weapons and closely watched the brush-covered 
banks on each hand, as well as every approaching traveler. There are 
only two ways of telling a caco from a harmless Haitian ; if he is armed 
or if he runs. Then the orders are to fire, for the " good citizens " do 
not carry weapons and are very careful to move slowly and be pre- 
pared to flourish their bon habitant card at sight of a white face or a 
gendarme uniform. Several times I fancied for an instant that we 
had been attacked, until I grew accustomed to the thump of stones with 
which the road was ever more thickly strewn striking the bottom of the 
car with reports startlingly like rifle-shots. From the crest of the first 
range we descended into the Artibonite Valley, remarkable for its 
colors. A constant series of rusty red humps, more beautiful at a dis- 
tance, no doubt, than to a hungry marine climbing over them expecting 
at any moment to run into a caco ambush, patches of scenery almost 



IX THE HAITIAN BUSH 155 

equal to the Alps in color, slender pines standing out against the red 
and tumbled background, here and there a clump of palm-trees to give 
contrast and a suggestion of peaceful tropical languor, spread before 
us farther than the eye could see. 

As far as the marine-garrisoned town of Mirebalais the road was 
passable, though it had steadily deteriorated from the modern highway 
of the plain to a road made only by the feet of animals and men. It 
would have been an exceedingly optimistic stranger, however, who 
could ever have attempted to drive an automobile over the mountain 
trail that lay beyond, yet over which the doughty Ford climbed as 
if military orders forbade it to give up so long as it retained a gasp of 
life. Here and there we forded a considerable stream, meeting at one 
of them a group of marines driving pack-laden donkeys and cattle, in 
some cases astride the latter, more often splashing thigh-deep through 
the water, and with a score of produce-bearing natives plodding at 
their heels for protection. Farther on we -passed an airplane camp, 
from which " God's wicked angels," as the natives call them, periodi- 
cally bombard the retreats of the cacos. Rumor has it that these war- 
riors of the air have not always made certain of the character of the 
gatherings they attack, and the cacos once sent a protest to England 
against the Americans for using a means of warfare which the " Haiti- 
ans fighting for their liberty " cannot combat or imitate. 

The name of Las Cahobas, the old Spanish form of the word for 
mahogany-trees, is an indication of the fact that it was formerly within 
the territory of Santo Domingo. It is a miserable little town in which 
the palm-trunk huts that are the lowest form of dwelling in Cuba are 
considered residences de luxe. A whitewashed jail where the hundred 
or more black inmates, most simply dressed in two-piece suits of red- 
and-white striped cotton, seem only too glad to get their three meals 
a day, two of them with meat rations, was the chief sight of interest. 
Some of the gendarme guards had become so thoroughly Americanized 
under their marine officers that they " rolled their own," closed their 
tobacco-sacks with their teeth, and returned them to hip-pockets exactly 
as required by our military manuals. It is remarkable what can be 
done with a backward race under proper guidance. The officers them- 
selves, nearly all enlisted men in the organization from which they had 
been loaned, were, like most of those I met throughout the country, 
forceful, energetic, efficient chaps, many of whom spoke the mative 
" creole " as if they had been born in the district. In the North we 
scarcely think of a corporal or sergeant of marines as standing par- 



156 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ticularly high in the social scale; in these Haitian villages they have 
almost the power of absolute monarchs, and are treated with corre- 
sponding respect by their native subjects. Even the village accounts 
are periodically brought to them to be audited. So accustomed do the 
Haitians become to obeying the commander of the district in which 
they live that it is difficult to get them to change their allegiance. A 
marine major who had long reigned in a certain region summoned all 
the native authorities to meet a newly arrived lieutenant colonel, ex- 
plaining that the latter was thereafter the commander in chief ; yet as 
long as the major remained, he never broke the natives of the habit of 
appealing to him first of all whenever any official matter turned up. 

On the edge of Las Cahobas, as here and there along the road to 
it, was a Haitian cemetery. These are invariably bare and sun- 
scorched, the graves covered with vault-shaped structures ranging from 
heaped-up cobbles to almost elaborate stone and plaster mounds. With- 
out crosses or any other indication of the Christian faith, they seem 
to be direct importations from the interior of Africa, and though one 
knows that the stones are piled there primarily to keep the energetic 
Haitian pigs from rooting up and feasting on the corpses, it is hard 
to think of them as anything but the African's protection against the 
voodoo spirits which must be forcibly prevented from escaping out of 
bodies committed to the earth. The usual Haitian funeral is accom- 
panied with strange rites destined to exorcise these same spirits, after 
which others of a totally different nature enliven the proceedings, for 
the corpse is generally carried on the heads of men who dance and sing 
in a drunken orgy all the way to the burial-ground. 

Market-women were still straggling toward town when we returned. 
The view of the Cul-de-Sac plain toward sunset, carpeted with brown 
and green vegetation, speckled here and there with little houses, the 
lakes on the left and the ocean on the right reflecting the colors of the 
purple a.nd lilac clouds which hung above the mountains, was as strik- 
ing as any I had seen in many a day. Nearer the capital the road was 
still almost crowded, while here and there under the trees beside it the 
women, their big straw hats off now, but still wearing their brilliant 
bandanas, had camped for the night, and were cooking their humble 
dinners on fagot fires. Once we found a woman bareheaded, but this 
was because she was tearing her hair and shrieking in what seemed to 
be physical agony. As she caught sight of my uniformed companions, 
she rushed out upon them and reported that she had been robbed by 
cacos of the produce she had expected to spread out in the big market- 



I 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 157 

square before the cathedral by the dawn of Saturday. Such things 
happen even on the broad highway into Port au Prince, while more 
often still gendarmes are sent out along the road by some colonel or 
major whose wife has invited guests, with orders to buy the chickens 
and turkeys needed before they reach the close competition of the 
market. In either case the women are deeply disgruntled, for the mere 
selling is only half their pleasure in offering their wares. 

Of the other two highways out of Port au Prince one climbs into the 
hills to Petionville, from which a trail leads to cool and refreshing 
Furcy, among its pine-trees, four thousand feet above the sea. A 
longer road is that to the southern peninsula. Leaving the capital at 
the opposite end of the main street from that to the Cul-de-Sac, it 
passes the " navy yard " and skirts the bay for miles beyond. It, too, 
is apt to be crowded with market-women, and with donkeys, women, 
and men carrying rock salt from Leogane. Half-way to that town 
there is a clearing in the dense woo'ds famed as the scene of frequent 
voodoo rites, and for a long space the road is bordered by the scraggly 
tree-bushes of an abandoned castor-bean plantation from which our 
Government once hoped to produce oil for its airplanes. Leogane is a 
town of considerable size, the usual grass-grown square of which is 
faced by a quaint old church of what might almost be called Haitian 
architecture. Churches were the only buildings spared by the infuri- 
ated slaves in their revolt against the French, as the priests were the 
only white people who escaped attack, but neglect and the tropical cli- 
mate have in most cases completed the work of destruction. The town 
and the region about it is one of the few places in Haiti where the 
malarial mosquito abounds. Here, too, are to be found many bush- 
grown ruins of French plantations. Far to the westward along the 
tongue of land forming the southern horn of Haiti, and to be reached 
only by horse or boat, is the town of Jeremie, near which the elder 
Dumas was born, the son of a French general and a negro slave. 

The gendarme officer with whom I was traveling on this occasion, 
however, had come to inspect Jacmel, on the southern coast. At two 
and a half hours by Ford from the capital, the last part of it by a 
narrow dirt roadway winding through high hills, we changed to moth- 
eaten native horses and rode away down the River Gauche, which we, 
forded one hundred and eighteen times during the next four hours. 
The black soil was fertile, and cultivated in scattered patches even to 
the tops of the hills. Coffee in uncared-for luxuriance often bordering 



158 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the way showed what this region had been under the French. It was 
still well populated, for the people of the southern peninsula have 
never revolted, and cacos are unknown, though there is much petty 
thieving. At every turn of the trail startled, respectful negroes raised 
their hats as we passed, only a few of them having the half -sullen air 
of their fellow-countrymen elsewhere at sight of Americans. Their 
little huts of thatch, or tache, as yagua is called in Haiti, were every- 
where tucked away in the bush, cattle and pigs were numerous, though 
all animals except the goats had a half-starved appearance. Bananas 
and oranges grew in profusion ; the trail was strewn with the peelings of 
the native pear-shaped grape-fruit. Frequent patches of Kafir-corn, 
called pitimi, the " Creole " abbreviation of petit mats, waved their lofty 
heads of rice-like grain in the breeze. Immovable donkeys now and 
then blocked the trail, indifferent alike to the shrieks of their drivers 
and to the commanding voice of the native gendarme who accompanied 
us. Here and there washing parties of women were beating their rags 
on stones at the edge of the stream and spreading them out in the sun 
to bleach, their almost nude black bodies glistening in the sunshine and 
their tongues cackling incessantly until a glimpse of us reduced them to 
sudden silence. Several times we passed voodoo signs — a chicken 
with its entrails removed hanging by one leg from a pole, the white 
skull of a horse decorated with bits of red rag set on the top of a 
cactus-bush. Now and then we came across the most primitive form 
of cane-crusher except the human teeth. It consisted of a grooved 
stick driven through a tree or post, with a bit of sapling fastened at one 
end. While one negro held a sugar-cane, another rolled the sapling 
back and forth along it, the juice running down the groove into a gourd 
or pot. Wherever the breeze reached us the weather was agreeable ; 
in the breathless pockets of the hills the humid heat hung about us like a 
hot wet blanket. 

The marine-gendarme commander of Jacmel met us with an auto- 
mobile farther out along the trail than one had ever been driven before, 
and the astounded natives fled shrieking before it as if the malignant 
spirits they fancied they could hear groaning under its hood were visibly 
pursuing them. In the town itself the people greeted their benevolent 
despot with just such antics as one might fancy their forefathers per- 
formed before their African chiefs. Jacmel, however, has a number 
of " citizens of color " of education and moderate wealth. The hills 
about it grow two crops of coffee a year, cotton and cacao alternate all 
the year round, veritable forests of cotton-trees cover the sites of old 



. IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 159 

French plantations, and there is considerable shipping, though the bay 
is deep and dangerous. But its prosperity is mainly due, of course, to 
its lifelong freedom from cacos and revolutions. It is a hilly town of 
six thousand inhabitants, with sharp lines of caste, more stone build- 
ings than are usual in Haiti, a Protestant as well as a Catholic church, 
an imposing hotel de ville, with the familiar misstatement " Liberte, 
Egalite, Fraternite " on its f acade, " summer " homes in its suburbs, 
and a tile-roofed market. Strangers but seldom disrupt the languid 
tenor of its ways, however, and not only is there no hotel, but not even 
a place to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich, unless one accept the 
hospitality of marines or gendarme officers. Some years ago a foreign 
company erected an electric light plant, fitted up all Jacmel with elab- 
orate poles or underground wires, operated for one night, collected their 
government subsidy and as much as possible from the citizens, and fled. 
To this day the town continues to worry along with such lights as might 
be found in an African village. In 1896 it was completely wiped out 
by fire, the land and sea breeze joining to pile the flames so high that 
the population was forced to flee to the hills, leaving all their posses- 
sions behind. 

On our return to Port au Prince the road, particularly from Leogane 
in, was even more densely thronged than usual ; for it was the last day 
of the year, and New Year's is not only Haiti's day of independence, 
but the one on which presents are given, after the French custom. 
Women carrying on their heads heaps of native baskets higher than 
themselves, others with as disproportionate loads of gourds, donkeys 
laden to the point of concealment with anything there was any hope of 
selling for gifts at that evening's big market, filled the tumultuous wake 
behind us. I called that afternoon on the mulatto President of Haiti 
in the unfinished palace, and caught him and the minister of finance 
in the act of shaking and rearranging the rugs in preparation for the 
coming festivities. No doubt a president whose duties are assumed by 
men from the outside world must find something to do to pass the 
time. Next day, however, there was no such informality in his manner 
as he was driven in silk-hat solemnity to a Te Deum in the cathedral. 
Four prancing horses drew the presidential carriage, preceded and fol- 
lowed by a company of native horsemen in more than resplendent uni- 
forms and drawn sabers. At the door he was met by the archbishop 
and all the higher officers of our forces of occupation, who fell in 
behind the august ruler as he marched down the central aisle, flanked 
f at close intervals by negro firemen in brilliant red shirts of heavy 



i6o ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

flannel and shining metal helmets. In their wake came all the elite of 
Port au Prince, some in silk hats and full dress, nearly all in brand- 
new garb, for New Year's takes the place of Easter in this respect in 
Haiti, and so generously perfumed that the clouds of incense arising 
about the altar made no impression upon the nostrils. Outside, the 
great open square and the adjacent streets were compact seas of up- 
turned black faces. The booming of cannon frequently punctuated the 
ceremony, though the beating of tomtoms would have been more in 
keeping, and the cost of the powder might then have been spent in 
running the trade school which had just been abandoned for lack of 
funds. Faces running all the gamut from white to black were to be 
seen in the glaringly yellow interior, but none of the former were 
Haitian, and the latter were in the decided majority. The clergy were 
white, the acolytes black; the formality and solemnity which reigned 
could' scarcely have been equaled in the elaborate functions in Notre 
Dame of Paris. 

A Cuban bon mot has it that " The Haitian is the animal which most 
nearly resembles man." Without subscribing to so broad a statement, 
it must be admitted that they are close to the primitive savage despite a 
veneer of civilization which all but hides the African in the upper 
class and is so thin upon the masses as to be transparent. Tradition 
has it that when the uprising against the French was planned the con- 
spirators gave every slave some grains of corn, -telling him to throw one 
away every day and attack when none remained, for in no other way 
could they have known the date. To this day the intelligence of the 
masses is of that caliber. Readily capable of imitation, they initiate ' 
nothing, not even the next obvious move in the simplest undertakings. 
They have not a trace of gratitude in their make-up, no sexual morality, 
unbounded superstition, and no family love. Mothers gladly give away 
their children ; if they ever see them again there is no evidence of glad- 
ness shown on either side. They have a certain naive simplicity and 
some of the unintentional honesty that goes with it; they have of 
course their racial cheerfulness, though even that is less in evidence 
than among most of their race. A French woman who has spent nearly 
all her life in Haiti long tried to discover some symptoms of poetical 
fancy or love for the beautiful among the full blacks. One day she 
found a servant sitting in the back yard looking up into the tree-tops. 
Asked what he was thinking about, he answered, " I am not thinking ; 
I am listening to the breeze in the cocoanut-palms." That is the sum 










Ruins of the old French estates are to be found all over Haiti 




A Haitian wayside store 




The market women of Haiti sell everything under the sun — A " General Store" in a Haitian 

market 




»—»™ ■"^^"^^S^'S^Kf"- 



There are still more primitive sugar mills than these in Haiti 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 161 

total of sentiment during long years of observation. Family relations 
are little short of promiscuous. Girls who have reached the age of 
ten are made to understand that they must be on the lookout for lovers ; 
mothers refuse to support them after they have grown old enough to 
live with a man. An old maid is considered a freak of nature in Haiti, 
and such freaks are exceedingly rare in the Black Republic. 

More temperamental than our own negroes, the Haitians are in- 
credibly childlike in their mental processes. A certain gendarme officer 
whose butler was frequently remiss in his duties had him enrolled in 
the native corps in order to bring military discipline to bear upon him. 
A few days later the servant requested that he be given the right to 
carry arms, like other gendarmes. The officer good naturedly gave him 
a harmless old revolver that had been captured from the cacos. A few 
days later reports began to leak into headquarters that the national force 
was terrorizing the inhabitants of a certain section of Port au Prince. 
The detectives got busy, and found that the gendarme-butler, his day's 
service over, was in the habit of patrolling that part of town in which 
he was born and where he was well known, strutting back and forth 
among his awed fellow-citizens during the evening, and from midnight 
on beating on house doors and commanding the inmates, " in the name 
of the law," and at the point of his revolver, to come outside and line up 
" for inspection." He had no designs upon their possessions, but was 
simply indulging his love for display and authority. When his em- 
ployer took his putative weapon away from him again, he wept like a 
child of six. His grief, however, was short lived, for when the Presi- 
dent called at the home of the officer on New Year's afternoon, he 
found the butler so dressed up that he inadvertently shook hands with 
him as one of the guests. 

Abuse of authority is a fixed fault in the Haitian character, as with 
most negroes. Of the several reasons why there are only two or three 
native lieutenants in the gendarmerie, lack of intelligence and dishonesty 
are less conspicuous than the inability to wield authority lightly. The 
Haitians of the masses have only three forms of recreation, dances, 
cock-fights, and voodooism. They have not even risen to the level of 
the " movies," for though there are two cinemas in the capital and one 
in Cap Haitien, these are too '' high brow " for any but the upper class. 
Of pretty native customs we found only one — that of hanging up little 
colored-paper churches with candles inside them at Christmas-time. 
The Haitians are inveterate gamblers, which is only another way of 
saying that they abhor work. As the negro admires the successful and 



162 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

dominant, so he has supreme contempt for the broken and discredited. 
The Germans who once ruled the commercial roost in Haiti and who 
were interned after our entry into the war would find no advantage in 
returning, even if they were permitted to, for they have lost for life 
the respect of the natives by allowing themselves to be arrested. The 
profiteering Syrians who have largely inherited their control of com- 
merce have far more standing to-day despite their slippery methods. 

Between the primitive bulk of the population and the slight minority 
of educated citizens, mainly " people of color," there is a wide gulf. 
Haiti has no middle class, not even a skilled labor class. Those who 
have ambition or wealth enough to go in for " higher education " will 
have nothing to do with anything even suggestive of manual labor. 
The ability to read, write, and speak French automatically brings with 
it a contempt for work and workers. As in all Latin America, an agri- 
cultural school is worse than useless, because it serves only to spoil 
what might have been good foremen, and the mere possession of a 
scrap of paper announcing the holder a graduate of such an institution 
is prima-facie evidence that he intends to loaf in the shade all the rest 
of his days. The result is that the population is made up of poverty- 
stricken, incredibly ignorant laborers and peasants, and of lawyers, 
" doctors " of this and that, and the political-military class which 
tyrannizes and fattens on the African masses. 

Superficially, the educated class of Haiti is pleasant to meet, though 
the first impression seldom lasts. It has all the outward manners of 
the French, with none of their solid basis. In discussions of literature 
and art these " gens de couleur " could give the average American busi- 
ness man cards and spades ; in actually doing or producing something 
worth while they are completely out of their depth. Once in a blue 
moon one runs across a full-blooded negro who shows outcroppings of 
genius. We were invited to meet such a one at the home of a " high 
yellow " senator on New Year's eve, a pianist who had studied in Paris. 
I had been told that there were several fine musicians in Haiti, but, in 
the light of other experiences, had inwardly scoffed at the idea. It re- 
quired but very little time to be convinced that here at least was one. 
The man not only played the best classics in a manner that would have 
been applauded in the highest class of concert halls, but gave several 
pieces of his own composition which could hold their place in any pro- 
gram. He had played a few times in the United States, but the draw- 
back of color had proved insurmountable, and as there is naturally no 
income to be derived from such a source in Haiti, Ludovic Lamothe 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 163 

now holds a minor clerkship in the ministry of agriculture ! When he 
had finished, the senator himself sat down at the piano and gave an 
exhibition which, I have no hesitancy in asserting, could scarcely have 
been duplicated by any member of our own upper house, and one which 
reminded us by contrast of the uproarious rag-time that was even at 
that moment reigning along Broadway. Yet it was such men as these 
that our marines once evicted from the Haitian senate with, " Come on, 
you niggers, get out of here ! " Even the Southerner who had been 
induced to come with us, and whose muscles seemed to tense with in- 
ward horror as our host greeted him with a handshake and introduced 
him to the pianist, gradually shrank down into his chair in unconscious 
acknowledgment of his own ignorance of the higher things of life as 
compared with these cultured " niggers." 

We met a few other men of this type at the yearly " Haitian ball " in 
the chief native club, which American civilians attend, to the unbounded 
disgust of the forces of occupation. Yet the primitive African now 
and then showed itself in the whitest of them. Those who know them 
well say that even Haiti's elite, educated in Europe or the United 
States, are apt to forget their Christian faith when troubles assail them 
and go to a " Papa Loi " for a wanga, or charm, and pay for a voodoo 
ceremony. In Paris lives a certain Mme. Thebes, in high repute among 
those who believe in sorcery and prophecy. If the stories which grad- 
ually leak out from the confidences of returning natives to their friends 
are trustworthy, she tells all Haitians that they are some day to become 
president of their country, not a bad guess under old conditions, though 
the supernatural madame does not seem to have kept up with the times. 
More than one revolution has been started on the strength of her 
prophecies. Some of these upper-class " people of color " are de- 
scendants of the same families who fled to Philadelphia and New Or- 
leans at the time of the slave revolt. The members who remained 
behind were or have since become intermixed with the blacks. At least 
one American connected with the forces of occupation was introduced 
at a presidential reception to a colored family of the same name, which 
turned out to be relatives. As the American chanced, to be a South- 
erner, it is easy to imagine whether the discovery brought joy and 
mutual social calls. 

Stories of human sacrifices, cannibalism, and occult poisonings are 
always going the rounds in Haiti, though it is difficult to find any one 
of unquestioned integrity who has actually seen such things himself. I 
met two gendarme officers who asserted they had found the feet of a 



164 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

black baby sticking out of a boiling pot, and there are numbers of well- 
balanced Americans in Haiti who are firmly convinced that all three of 
the crimes above mentioned are practised. Certainly many of the na- 
tives look hungry enough to eat their own children. The body of a 
marine was once found in a condition to bear out the charge of canni- 
balism, but it has never been proved that this was not the work of 
hogs or dogs. Most frequent of all, say the believers, are the cases of 
blood-sucking, the victims being preferably virgins. Not long before 
our occupation a baby in the best district of Port au Prince died for loss 
of blood, which an old neighbor later confessed to having inflicted while 
the mother was out of the room. The daughter of a former minister is 
said to have been similarly treated by her grandmother and a prominent 
man. The rite over, they pronounced her dead, and she was buried 
with much pomp, the grandmother, according to the story, replacing 
with coffee the embalming fluid that was poured down her throat. Five 
years later a rumor of her existence having reached a priest through 
the confessional, what is believed to be the same girl was discovered in 
a hill town. She was wild, unkempt, demented, and had borne three 
children. The coffin was dug up, and in it was found her wedding 
dress, — for though she was only eight or nine at the time, it is the 
custom in Haiti to bury young girls in such garments, — but the autopsy 
proved the remains to be those of a man, the legs cut off and laid along- 
side the body. That there are Haitian Obeah practitioners who have so 
remarkable a knowledge of vegetable poisons that they can destroy 
their enemies or those of their clients without being detected seems to be 
generally admitted. Some of these poisons are said to be so subtle 
that the victims live for years, dying slowly as from some wasting dis- 
ease, or going insane, deaf, blind, or dumb, with the civilized medical 
profession helpless to relieve them. Men of undoubted judgment and 
integrity, some of them Americans, claim to have positive proof of such 
cases. 

The less gruesome forms of Obeah and voodooism are known to be 
practised in Haiti. The former is a species of witchcraft by men and 
women who are supposed to possess supernatural powers, and who cer- 
tainly have far greater sway over the masses of the people than priests 
or presidents. For a small sum they will undertake to help in business 
matters, to create love in unresponsive breasts, possibly to put an enemy 
out of the way, and some of the " stunts " they perform are beyond 
comprehension. Voodooism, unlike the other, is a form of religion, the 
deity being an imaginary " great green serpent," with a high priest 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 165 

known as " Papa Loi " and a priestess called " Maman Loi." Chicken 
snakes and a harmless python are kept as sacred beings in Haiti, and 
fed by the faithful. In theory the serpent deity demands sacrifices of 
a "goat without horns"; in other words, a child, preferably white. 
But there is no positive evidence to prove that anything more than 
goats, sheep, or roosters are actually sacrificed. These simpler rites 
are carried on almost openly, and are accompanied by all sorts of 
childish incantations, with such nonsensical fetishes as red rags, dried 
snakes and lizards, human bones, or portions of human organs, stolen 
perhaps from graveyards. The most frequent form of revenge among 
the Haitian masses is the burying of a bottle filled with " charms " of 
this nature, over which are recited various incantations at certain 
phases of the moon, in the hope of bringing destruction or lesser pun- 
ishment on the object of the enmity. So firm is the belief of the ne- 
groes in the power of Obeah that they sometimes succumb to fear and 
die merely because some one has cast such a spell upon them. A French 
priest who was traveling through the country called at a cabin one 
night to ask the occupant to show him the way. The man refused, 
whereupon the priest, being denied the customary form of expressing 
displeasure, began to recite a quotation from Ovid. To his surprise 
the native dashed out of his hut, fell at his feet, and offered to do any- 
thing he demanded, if only he would not " put Obeah " on him. Perhaps 
the most serious result of these practices is the appalling number of 
children who die under the ministrations of voodoo " doctors." 

A group of Americans once offered to pay for a voodoo supper if 
they were allowed to attend it. White men are seldom admitted to the 
native ceremonies ; some have suffered for their intrusion. In this case 
there was the added fear that the officials who saw the rites would 
forbid them thereafter ; but a Frenchman finally persuaded the natives 
that it would be to their advantage to let the Americans see one of their 
festivities in order to prove that they were harmless. How much was 
left out because of the guests there is of course no means of knowing. 

About seventy dollars was spent for corn-meal, tafia (crude native 
rum), sacrifices, and other things required, and to pay the chief per- 
formers their fees. The temple was decorated with flags and various 
fetishes. The ceremony began with a tom-tom dance by the priests, 
who were soon joined by the high priestess, wearing a white skirt, a 
red waist, and a brilliant bandana, and waving spangled flags. Then 
a goat, scrubbed to spotless white, its horns gilded, and a red bow on 
its head, was brought in. The priestess danced about it with a snaky 



166 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

motion, holding her shoulders stiffly and giving her waist the maximum 
of movement. Then she got astride the goat and rode round and 
round, clinging to its horns. Every few minutes the priests gave her 
tafia until she had worked herself into a real or feigned paroxysm of 
excitement. To say that she was intoxicated would perhaps be putting 
it too strongly, for the average Haitian is so soaked in rum from birth 
that it has little visible effect upon him. 

At length a priest caught up a handful of corn-meal and, with what 
appeared to be two careless gestures, formed a perfect cross with it on 
the ground. Candles were placed at the ends of the cross, then tafia 
and other liquors were poured along the lines of corn-meal, the priestess 
meanwhile continuing to ride the goat with hideous contortions. Fi- 
nally she dismounted, slipped off the white skirt, leaving her entirely 
clothed in red, and while a priest held the goat by the front feet she 
pierced a vein in its neck and drank all the blood she could contain. 
For a time she seemed to be in a stupor ; then she began to " prophesy " 
in loathsome, incomprehensible noises, which a priest " translated," 
probably in terms of his own choosing. While this pair howled, the 
goat was prepared and put in caldrons to cook, with rice, beans, tafia, 
salt, pepper, and lard. Old women stirred the contents of these with 
their bare hands, which had been bleached almost white by frequent 
emersions in similar boiling messes. When the food was cooked, the 
priestess came suddenly out of her trance and fell to with all the ne- 
groes present, who were still sitting about in a circle eating sacred goat 
meat and drinking tafia when the white spectators finally left. 

" The only thing wrong with the Haitians is lack of education," says 
a recent investigator, which can scarcely be doubted, since it is true 
of all mankind. By some oversight, perhaps, no mention of schools and 
courts was made in the treaty under which we are administering the 
country. The French maintained no schools for the negroes, and it 
goes without saying that conditions scarcely improved during the cen- 
tury and a quarter of independence. An American superintendent, 
who is quite properly a Catholic and of Louisiana creole stock, has been 
appointed, and is in theory directly responsible to the native minister 
of public instruction. But the higher American civilian officials, cling- 
ing perhaps too closely to the letter of the treaty, have not seen fit to 
assign any great amount of the public revenues of Haiti to this pur- 
pose. There are thirteen hundred teachers in the country, probably 
the majority of whom are in no way qualified for their task, and of 
the fifty thousand pupils enrolled barely one in three is in regular at- 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 167 

tendance. In other words, not ten per cent, of the children of school 
age get even primary instruction, and less than one per cent, ever reach 
the secondary schools. The law school in Port-au-Prince, with thirty 
students, is reported to be efficient ; the medical school is frankly a farce. 
Teaching methods are in all but a few cases primitive, consisting of little 
more than monologues by the " teacher," to which the pupils listen only 
when nothing else occupies their attention. A thorough reform in this 
matter is essential to the task we have undertaken in Haiti, unless we 
subscribe as a nation to the old Southern attitude that the negro is 
better off without education. The present generation is hopeless in 
this as in many other regards ; it remains to be seen whether we will and 
can lift the next out of the primitive savagery which at present reigns. 
The popular language of Haiti bears no very close resemblance to the 
tongue from which it is largely descended. The slaves came from 
different parts of Africa, in some cases belonging to enemy tribes, and 
" creole " is the natural evolution of their desire to talk with one an- 
other. The resultant dialect has French as a basis, but it is so ab- 
breviated, condensed, and simplified, and includes so many African 
words, that it has become almost a new language. It is quite distinct 
from the patois of Canada and even of the French West Indies, though 
there are points of resemblance. It has not even the inflection of real 
French, and only now and then does one knowing that language catch 
an intelligible word. Haitian voices have a softness equal to those of 
our Southern darkies, and are in marked contrast to the rasping tones 
of Cuba. It is a local form of politeness to use a squeaky falsetto in 
greetings, and women of the masses curtsy to one another when they 
shake hands, probably a survival from slave days originally adopted as 
a sign of their equality to their expelled mistresses. Gender, number, 
case, modes, tenses, and articles have almost completely disappeared. 
As a rule, only the feminine form of adjectives has survived. Plurality 
is indicated, when it is necessary, by a participle. Many words have 
been abbreviated almost out of recognition. Plalt-ilf has become 
" Aiti ? " The Dominicans over the border are called " Pagno." The 
word bagaille, probably a corruption of bagage, means almost anything; 
servants told to " pick up " that bagaille grasp whatever is nearest at 
hand; bon bagaille and pas bon bagaille are the usual forms of good 
and bad. " Who " has grown to be " Qui monde c,a ? " Many words 
have changed their meanings entirely; the urchin who approaches you 
rubbing his stomach and mumbling " grand gout," wishes to impress 
upon you the very probable fact that he has " large hunger." On the 



1 68 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

whole, it is probably an advantage, in learning Haitian " creole," not 
to know real French. 

The automobile in which we took our final leave of Port au Prince 
plowed its way for several miles along the thronged highway across the 
Cul-de-Sac plain, then turned west through an endless semi-desert 
bristling with thorny aroma. A dead negro lying a few yards from 
the road on the bare ground awakened no surprise from our native 
chauffeur or the gendarme in plain clothes beside him. There were 
no vultures flying about the body. Those natural scavengers were once 
introduced into Haiti, but the natives killed and ate them. Soon we 
came out on the edge of the sea, along the foot of those same cliffs 
we had seen while rolling in the doldrums on the Haitian navy three 
weeks before. What had then seemed a sheer mountain wall was in 
reality a fiat narrow plain backed by sloping hills. Naked black fisher- 
men were plying their trade thigh-deep in the blue water. Gonave 
island and the southern peninsula were almost golden brown under the 
early sun. For a long time the thorny desert continued, for southern 
Haiti had for months been suffering from drought. There were several 
ruins of ox-and-kettle sugar-mills, here and there evidences of former 
plantation houses ; miserable native huts leaning drunkenly against 
their broken walls. Once we passed a massive old stone aqueduct. 
The parched and sun-burned landscape was now and then broken by 
green oases of villages. A little railroad followed us all the way to 
St. Marc, but there was no sign of trains. The town was carpeted in 
dust, a ruined stone church towered above the low houses, a dust-and- 
stone-paved central square had a grandstand and a fountain screaming 
in the national colors. Down on the edge of the deep bay crooked, 
reddish logwood dragged in by donkeys was being weighed on large 
crude wooden scales. This chief product of the region to-day lay in 
heaps along the dusty road beyond. Cannon bearing the Napoleonic 
device and date, left by the ill-starred expeditionary force under 
Leclerc, served. as corner-posts of the bridges. The dense green of 
mango-trees contrasted with the dry mountain-walled plain ; nowhere 
was there a sprig cf grass, seldom a sign of water. Pitimi grew rather 
abundantly, however, and there was some cotton. About the mouth 
of the Artibonite, sometimes called the " Haitian Nile," was a spreading 
delta of greenery. Miserable thatched huts of mud plastered on reeds 
were numerous, yet blended so into the dull, dry landscape as scarcely 
to draw the attention. Negroes carrying huge loads of reed mats now 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 169 

and then jogged past in the hot dust; everywhere was what a native 
writer calls " l'aridite desolante de la campagne." Yet though the 
drought occasionally flagellates portions of it, there is scarcely a spot 
in Haiti which would not produce abundantly under anything like proper 
cultivation. 

Arid hills, with parched, purple-brown scrub forests, shut in the 
town of Dessalines, with its pathetic little forts that were long ago de- 
signed to protect the general of the same name. A small, dust-covered, 
baking-hot town well back from the sea in a kind of bay of the plain, 
it was indeed a negro capital. Farther on the dust and aridity largely 
disappeared. There was considerable cotton showing signs of lan- 
guid cultivation, some fields were being hoed, others irrigated, as we 
snaked in and out along the wrinkled skirts of the rocky range on the 
right. Crippled beggars lined the way even here ; in fact, there is a 
suggestion of India in the numbers of diseased mendicants squatting 
beside the dusty, sunny roads of Haiti. Women and children were 
bathing in brackish streams. Then it grew arid again, and we found 
Gonaives, more than a hundred miles from the capital, in a very dry 
setting on the edge of a smaller bay. It claims twenty-five thousand 
inhabitants, some of whom live in moderate comfort. As in Port au 
Prince, one was assailed on all sides by the modern Haitian motto, 
" Gimme fi' cents," which is really not so serious a demand as it sounds, 
since it only means five centimes. It was in Gonaives that independ- 
ence was declared in 1804, and from here Toussaint l'Ouverture was 
sent to France in chains. The town is engaged chiefly in commerce. 
From it we turned back north by east into the country. A pathetic 
little railroad again began to follow us. The first few miles over a 
range of foot-hills were burned as dry as all the southern slope ; then, 
as Ave climbed higher, it grew rapidly greener, the dust disappeared, 
we forded several small rivers many times, and were completely shut 
in by fresh and verdant vegetation before we reached Ennery. 

This is a stony, sleepy little hamlet among the mountains, famed in 
Haitian history as the place where Toussaint was living when the 
French general Brunet wrote him, asking for an interview, at which 
he was traitorously arrested and sent to end his days in a French 
dungeon. There we left the road to Cap Harden and, still fording, 
rising constantly over long humps of ground, always turning, grad- 
ually gained coffee-growing elevation. A fine new road, passing one 
large marine camp, carried us higher still, until green mountains stood 
all about us, the air grew pleasant as that of our Northern spring-time. 



170 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

and at length we found ourselves among pine-trees. Just after sun- 
down, in the soft gray-blue evening of the temperate tropics, we sighted 
the little white church of St. Michel, beyond which we spun across a 
floor-level plateau a little farther to the residence of an American estate 
manager. To say that we had covered a hundred and fifty miles com- 
fortably, with one short and one long stop, between daylight and dark 
gives some idea of what American occupation has done for Haitian 
roads. 

The great plains, fourteen hundred feet high, were flooded with 
moonlight all through the night, in which I several times awoke shiver- 
ing for all my heavy blankets. By day the sea-flat plateau proved to 
be covered with brown grass beneath which was the blackest of loamy 
soil. Gasolene tractors were turning this up, working by night as well 
as by day, and operated by Haitians who had been trained on the spot 
under American overseers. It was virgin soil, for this region was 
Spanish territory in the time of the French and had been used only as 
grazing land. The new company would soon have hundreds of acres 
planted in cotton, with other crops to follow. Such enterprises, multi- 
plied many fold, are among the most immediate needs of Haiti. 

Colonel W of the Marine Corps and Major General W , 

Chef de la Gendarmerie d'Haiti, who are one and the same person, 
set out that afternoon on an inspection trip through the heart of Haiti, 
and invited me to go along. The region being caco-infested and a 
" restricted district " in which white women were not allowed to travel, 
Rachel was to continue by automobile on the well-guarded highway to 
Cap Haitien. The colonel and I left the plantation by car also, skim- 
ming for more than an hour across the wonderful grassy plain without 
any need of a road. Groups of horses were grazing here and there, 
but there were no cattle. Occasionally we met a lone gendarme plod- 
ding along in the shoes to which he was still far from accustomed. 
An unfinished road carried us on from where the plain began to break 
up into rolling country, with clusters of trees in the hollows. Now 
and then the colonel brought down one of the deep-blue wild pigeons 
which flew frequently past, but the flocks of wild guineas usually 
found in this region had evidently been warned of his marksmanship. 
Four-footed game does not exist in Haiti, and even its harmless rep- 
tiles are rare ; Noah evidently did not touch the West Indies. Grad- 
ually the forest appeared, growing thicker and thicker, until we were 
inclosed in tunnels of vegetation, fording many small rivers. Suddenly 
a great hubbub ahead caused us to make sure that our rifles were in 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 171 

readiness, but it was only a cock-fight in the woods, the men standing, 
the women seated on little home-made chairs outside the male circle 
about the ring, made of barrel staves driven upright into the ground. 
In the next mile we passed a dozen black men, each with a rooster 
under one arm, hurrying to the scene of conflict. 

At the town of Maissade we halted at a marine camp on a hill over- 
looking the surrounding country, and commanded by Captain Becker, a 
famous hunter of cacos. His tent was almost filled with captured 
war material : rifles of every kind in use a century ago corded like so 
much stove-wood ; revolvers and pistols enough to stock a museum 
devoted to the history and development of that arm ; French swords 
dating back to the seventeenth century; rapiers such as flash through 
Dumas's stories ; heaps of rusted machetes, battered bugles, bamboo 
musical instruments, and hollow-log tomtoms from voodoo temples; 
drums abandoned by Leclerc; ragged pieces of uniform decorated with 
ribbons ; dozens of hats and caps of " generals," of felt, cloth, and 
straw, all more or less ragged, and all bearing such signs of rank as 
might be adopted by small boy warriors. Then there were beads and 
charms, Obeah vials found on the bodies of dead cacos, mysterious ar- 
ticles of unknown purpose and origin. The captain dissected one of the 
charms. It consisted of a bullet wrapped in a dirty bit of paper on 
which were scrawled a few strange characters, the dried foot of a 
lizard, and what was apparently a powdered insect, all inclosed in a 
brass cartridge-shell, with a string attached to it long enough to go 
around the neck of the original owner, whom it was supposed to pro- 
tect against bullets. The captain had shot him a few days before, and 
as he fell he cried out in " Creole," " O Mama, they 've got me ! " then 
died cursing the Obeah man for making an imperfect charm. Some of 
the cacos in the region had recently surrendered, and had been made 
" division commanders," with the duty of helping to hunt down their 
former comrades. One of them had showed the marine who shot him 
the bullet which he had dug out of his flesh with a machete, and now fol- 
lowed him everywhere like a faithful dog. 

In the town itself the gendarme detachment was in command of 
a native lieutenant who was rated an excellent officer, but he had 
barely a touch of negro blood. Beyond was a road of boulevard width 
along which we spun at thirty-five miles an hour. Wild pigeons, par- 
rots, and negroes far less ragged than those of Port au Prince enlivened 
the striking scenery, and at sunset we drew up before the gendarmerie 
of Hinche, the birthplace of the departed Charlemagne. There was 



172 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

something amusingly anachronistic in the sight of half a hundred ma- 
rines playing baseball and basketball on the plain about their camp 
at the edge of town, for Hinche itself had little in common with such 
scenes. 

All Haitian towns have a close family resemblance. There is always 
a big, brown, bare, dusty central place, with a tiny band-stand with 
steps painted in the national colors and surmounted by a single royal 
palm-tree, called the " pat He." From this radiate wide, right-angled 
dirt streets lined by low houses, some of plastered mud, a few white- 
washed, many of split palm trunks, most of them of tache, nearly all 
with earth floors, all except the few covered with corrugated iron in 
the center of town being roofed with thatch. Some have narrow 
sapling-pillared porches paved with little cobblestones, these sometimes 
also whitewashed ; and where houses are missing are broken hedges of 
organ cactus on which hang drying rags of clothing. Facing the place 
is a more or less ruined church, farther off a large open market-place, 
with perhaps a few ragged thatch-roof shelters from the sun. Then 
there is sure to be a spick-and-span gendarmerie, with large numbers 
of docile prisoners and proud black gendarmes, perhaps a group of 
marines, or at any rate of their native prototypes, here and there stalk- 
ing through the dusty streets, ignoring the respectful greetings of the 
teeming black populace squatted in their doorways or on their dirt 
floors. Little fagot fires on the ground behind or beside the huts, a 
well-worn path down to the river, and an indefinable scent of the 
tropics and black humanity living in primitive conditions complete the 
picture. Men who have seen both assert that a Congo village is a 
paradise compared with a Haitian hamlet. 

The curate came over to smoke a cigarette and drink a sip of rum 
with us after supper. He was a large, powerful Frenchman from 
Brittany, of remarkably fine features, sparkling blue eyes, and no recent 
hair-cut or shave, dressed in an ecclesiastical bonnet and enormous 
" congress " shoes run down at heel, and the long black gown which 
seems so out of place, yet is really very convenient, in the tropics. For 
twelve years he had shepherded Hinche and the neighboring region, 
being much of the time the only white man in it. He expected to com- 
plete twenty-five years' residence, then go home in retirement. He 
traveled freely everywhere within his district, caco sentinels and the 
bands themselves hiding when he passed rather than molest him. 
Cannibalism was certainly practised to this day, in his opinion, espe- 
cially among the hills, where there were many negroes older than he 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 173 

who had never come to town. There was less superstition in this dis- 
trict, he asserted, because the people came somewhat under the more 
civilized Dominican influence. While we talked, two former cacos, 
now " division chiefs," came in to report to the efficient young Ameri- 
can gendarme commander, simple old souls with childlike eyes and 
Napoleon III beards whom one would scarcely have suspected of harm- 
ing a chicken. The day before two native women had brought in a caco 
whom they had cudgeled into submission, and that afternoon an old 
man, unarmed, had presented the commander with another, leading 
him by a rope around the neck. 

In these circumstances we set out on horseback next morning in no 
great fear of the bandits, though we kept our rifles and revolvers 
handy. With us went a curious dwarf who lived in the next town and 
who had attached himself to the Americans like a stray mastiff, which 
he closely resembled in expression and in his devotion to them. He 
was of full size from the waist upward, but his legs were scarcely a 
foot long, and his bare feet hardly reached to the edges of the saddle in 
which he sat, once he had been placed there, with all the assurance of a 
cow-boy of the plains. Then there was " Jim," looking like the advance 
agent of a minstrel show. " Jim " was a descendant of American ne- 
groes, his grandparents having come from Philadelphia to Samana, 
Santo Domingo, where a number of black colonists from our northern 
states settled at the invitation of the Haitians when they ruled the 
whole island. He spoke a fluent English, with a mixture of Southern 
and foreign accent, as well as " Creole " and Spanish, and having 
served the colonel as interpreter years before during the marine advance 
from Monte Cristi to Santiago, had come to Haiti to join him again 
when he took charge of the gendarmerie. He had been assigned to 
plain-clothes duty, but " Jim's " conception of that phrase did not in- 
clude the adjective, and he had set forth on what promised to be any- 
thing but a dressy expedition in a garb well suited for a presidential 
reception. This was already beginning to show the effects of scram- 
bling through the underbrush in quest of the wild pigeons which had 
fallen before the colonel's shot-gun. 

The mayor of Hinche, a first cousin of Charlemagne, saw us off in 
person, holding the colonel's stirrup and bidding him farewell with 
bared head. We forded the Guayamoc River and wound away through 
foot-hills that soon gave way to a brown, level savanna which two years 
before had been covered with cattle, now wholly disappeared. Once we 
climbed over a large hill of oyster-shells, which geologists would no 






174 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

doubt recognise as proof that the region was formerly under the sea; 
but the French colonists of long ago were probably as fond of oysters 
as are their fellow-countrymen to-day, and it is' worthy of note that 
these were all half-shells. We passed one small village in a hollow, 
with a mud hut full of gendarmes ; the rest of the morning the dry and 
arid, yet lightly wooded, country was almost wholly uninhabited. For 
long spaces the scornful cries of black crows were the only sounds 
except the constant switching required to keep our thin Haitian horses 
and mules on the move. 

Thomasique, where we halted for lunch at the mud-hut gendarmerie, 
was a dismal little hamlet of lopsided thatched hove's. The commander 
of the district had found a new use for captured caco rifles, using the 
barrels as gratings for his outdoor cooking-place. The juge de paix, 
the magistrate, and the richest man of the town, ranging in color from 
quadroon to griffe, called to pay their respects to the general, frankly 
admitting by their attitude that the young American lieutenant of gen- 
darmes was their superior officer. Under his guidance the revenues 
of Thomasique had increased five fold in a single month. It was evi- 
dent from the manner of the judge that he had something on his chest, 
and at length he unburdened himself. The Government, it seemed, 
had not paid him his salary — of one dollar a month — for more than 
half a year, and he respectfully petitioned the general to take the matter 
up with the president upon his return to Port au Prince. There was 
probably a connection between his lack of funds and the auditing of the 
village accounts by the lieutenant. 

The country was more broken beyond. Pine-trees of moderate size 
grew beside girlishly slender little palms with fan-shaped leaves. A 
high bank of blue gravel along a dry river-bed would probably have 
attracted the attention of a miner or a geologist. In detail the country 
was not pretty ; in the mass it was vastly so. Brown, reddish, and 
green hills were heaped up on every hand; the play of colors across 
them, changing at every hour from dawn through blazing noonday into 
dusk and finally moonlight, made up for the monotony of the near-by 
landscape. There were almost no signs of humanity, the silence was 
sometimes complete, though here and there we passed the evidences of 
former gardens in dry arroyos. Toward sunset we burst suddenly out 
among banana-groves, starting up a great flock of wild guineas, and at 
dark rode into Cerca la Source, a more than usually whitewashed little 
town nestled among real mountains. It was Sunday, and the great 
weekly cock-fight having just ended at the barrel-stave pit in a corner 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 175 

of the immense open place, the hubbub of settling bets had not yet 
subsided, and for a half hour afterward scores of negroes with pretty 
game-cocks under their arms wandered about in the moonlight shouting 
merry challenges to one another for the ensuing Sabbath. 

Beyond Cerca la Source a steep mountain trail climbs for hours 
through the stillness of pine-forests where birds, except the cawing 
crows, are rare and almost no human habitations break the vista of 
tumbled world over which even the native horses make their way with 
difficulty. A telephone wire known among the marines as the " beer- 
bottle line," those being the only insulators to be had when it was con- 
structed by our forces of occupation, is the one dependable guide 
through the region. Four hours brought us to a score of sorry huts in 
a little hollow known as La Miel. Even that had its hilltop gendarmerie 
and prison, commanded by a native sergeant, who had his force drawn 
up for inspection when we arrived, though he had no warning of the 
colonel's approach or any other proof of his official character other than 
the blouseless uniform he wore. A white rascal owning a marine uni- 
form could play strange tricks in Haiti. Even here there was a big 
French bell of long ago supported by poles at some distance from the 
broken-backed church, and Spanish influence of the Dominicans beyond 
the now not very distant border showed itself in such slight matters as 
the use of " yo " for " ge " and " buen " instead of " bon." There fol- 
lowed a not very fertile region, with more pine-trees and long, brown, 
tough grass, with only here and there a conuco, shut in by the slanted 
pole fences native to Santo Domingo, planted with weed-grown pois 
Congo, manioc, and tropical tubers. In mid-afternoon, where the vege- 
tation grew more dense, it began to rain, as we had been warned it 
would here before our departure from Port au Prince. The first 
sprinkle increased to a steady downpour by what would probably have 
been sunset, the trail became toboggans of red mud down which our 
weary animals skated for long distances, or sloughs so deep and slopes 
so steep that we were forced to dismount and wade, or climb almost 
on all fours. Dripping coffee-bushes under higher trees sometimes 
lined the way, the best information we got from any of the rare 
passers-by was that our destination was a '• little big distance " away. 
That it remained until we finally slipped and sprawled our way into it. 

It rains the year round in the dismal mountain village where we spent 
the night, until the thatched mud houses are smeared with a reeking 
slime, and the earth floors are like newly plowed garden patches in the 
early spring. The place was more than three thousand feet above the 



176 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

sea, and the cold seemed to penetrate to the very marrow even within 
doors. It was ruled with an iron hand by an " old-timer " who had 
been so long a sergeant in the Marine Corps that he had come to divide 
all the world into exact gradations of rank. My companion he un- 
failingly addressed as " the General," never by the familiar pronoun 
" you," and he took personal charge of everything pertaining to his 
comfort, even to removing his wet garments and extracting the bones 
from his chosen portions of chicken. Nothing would induce him to eat 
before the general had finished or to sit down in his presence.' My- 
self he treated almost as an equal, or as he might have another sergeant 
who slightly outranked him in length of service, with now and then a 
hint of scorn at my merely civilian standing. He was probably as 
small a man as ever broke into our military service, yet the stentorian 
voice in which he invariably gave his commands to the great hulking 
negro who served as cook in the unsheltered " kitchen " outside and as 
general factotum about the hut never failed to cause that person to 
prance with fear. The natives he addressed in the same tone, and the 
whole town seemed to spring to attention when he opened the door and 
bawled out into the night for the mayor to " Report here on the double 
quick." How the Haitians managed to understand his English was a 
mystery, but they lost no time in obeying every order. After the gen- 
eral had retired, the lieutenant, for such was his rank in the gendar- 
merie, confided to me that he had several books on " Creole " and was 
preparing to learn it. As I had been on the lookout for something of 
the kind since my arrival in Haiti, hitherto in vain, I expressed a desire 
to see them. The lieutenant cast aside a soaked tarpaulin and handed 
me half a dozen French grammars such as are used in our own 
schools. 

The colonel's clothing was dry and newly pressed when we set out 
again next morning, though my own was still dripping. " Jim's " plain 
clothes were by this time worthy a still more commonplace adjective, 
for in addition to the mishaps of the trail, he had spent the night in 
them on the bare earth floor of the gendarme barracks. There came a 
few more red mud toboggans, then we came out on a vista of half 
northern Haiti, to which we descended by a rock trail worn horseback 
deep in the mountain-side and so steep that even " Jim " for once 
deigned to dismount. The rain ceased a few hundred feet down, 
though the sky remained dull and overcast, in striking contrast to the 
speckless blue heavens of southern Haiti, for the seasons are reversed 
in the two parts of the country. A few hours' jog across another sa- 





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IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 177 

vanna of denser vegetation than the plateau of St. Michel brought us 
to the considerable town of Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican border, 
where an automobile bore us away to the west. The great Plaine du 
Nord, once completely covered with sugar-cane and dotted with French 
plantation houses and mills, was now a wilderness teeming with blue- 
legged wild guineas, here and there some bush-grown stone ruins, 
through which a mud road and a single telephone wire forced their way. 
^Ye passed the populous towns of Terrier Rouge and Le Trou, famed 
for their caco sympathies, and Limonade, in the grass-grown old church 
of which Christophe, Emperor of northern Haiti, was once stricken with 
apoplexy, and brought up in the mud and darkness at Cap Haitien. 

Meanwhile Rachel had reached " the Cape," as it is familiarly called, 
by the usual route. Leaving Ennery, this had begun at once to climb 
the mountain Puilboreau, winding in and out along its wrinkled face. 
The vegetation was rather monotonous, with a yellowish tinge to the 
several shades of green, now and then an orange cactus blossom, a 
purple morning glory, a pink vine, or the old-gold bark of a tree adding 
a touch of color. The view back down the valley, with its tiny specks 
of houses, remained unbroken until they reached the summit three 
thousand feet above the sea at Bakersville, so called for the marine 
who had charge of this difficult bit of road building, when there burst 
forth as far-reaching a scene to the north. The Plaisance Valley lay 
under the heavy gray veil of a rain-cloud, the harbor of Cap Haitien 
visible far below, and far off on the horizon was the faint line of what 
seemed to be Tortuga, chief of Haiti's " possessions " and once the fa- 
vorite residence of buccaneers. The change of landscape was abrupt; 
heavy, dense green vegetation smelling of moisture surrounding the 
travelers on every hand as they wound down the mountain-side by a 
mud-coated highway, passing here and there gangs of road laborers. 
This northern slope was more thickly inhabited, thatched huts conspic- 
uous by their damp brown against the greenery occasionally clustering 
together into villages in which some of the mud walls were whitewashed 
or painted. Market-women bound for " the Cape," men grubbing in 
the fields, women paddling clothes — sometimes those in which they 
should have been dressed — in the streams, all gave evidence of the 
slighter dread of cacos on this northern slope. Then came another 
climb and a descent into the valley of the Limbe, some miles along 
which brought them to the village of the same name and to the greatest 
difficulty to the automobilist in Haiti. 

The fording of the Limbe is certain to be the chief topic of conversa- 



178 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tion between those who have traveled from Port au Prince to Cap Hai- 
tien. At times it is impassable, and has been known to delay travelers 
for a week. This time men and women were crossing with bundles on 
their heads and the water barely up to their armpits. A gang of pris- 
oners was brought from the village gendarmerie, the vitals of the car 
removed and sent across on their heads, then with the passengers sitting 
on the back of the back seat, the baggage in their laps, the reunited 
gang, amid continual shrieks of "Pousses!" and an excited jabbering 
of " creole," eventually dragged and pushed the dismantled automobile 
to the opposite shore. An hour and a half passed between the time it 
halted on one bank and started out again from the other, which was 
close to a record for the crossing. From there on the wide, but muddy, 
road, now thronged with people returning from market with their pur- 
chases or empty baskets, passed many ruins of old plantations, and the 
crumbling stone and plaster gate-posts which once flanked the only 
entrances to them. 

Cap Haitien, the second city of Haiti, sometimes called the " capital 
of the North," is situated on a large open bay in which the winds fre- 
quently play havoc. On its outer reef the flagship of Columbus came 
to grief on Christmas eve, 1492, and the discoverer spent Christmas as 
the guest of the Indian chief who then ruled the district. The wreckage 
of the Santa Maria was brought ashore near the present fisher village 
of Petit Anse, and here was erected the first European fort in the New 
World. In the days of Haiti's prosperity Cap Haitien was known as 
the " Paris of America " and rivaled in wealth and culture any other 
city in the western hemisphere. Then it had an imposing cathedral, 
several squares and places decorated with fountains and statuary, and 
was noted for its fine residences and urbane society. Old stone ruins 
still stretch clear out to the lighthouse on a distant point. Destroyed 
by the revolting blacks, by Christophe in his wars against Petion, by 
an earthquake or two, and by more than a century of neglect and tropi- 
cal decay, it retains little evidence of its former grandeur. Some of its 
wide streets, however, are still stone-paved, and bear names which carry 
the imagination back to medieval France. A few of its citizens live in 
moderate comfort; the overwhelming majority are content to loll out 
their days in uncouth hovels. It is so populous that it supports a 
cinema, and some of its business houses are moderately up to date and 
prosperous, though these are in most cases owned by foreigners. The 
acrid smell of raw coffee everywhere assails the nostrils; coffee spread 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 179 

out on canvas or on the cement pavement of one of its few remaining 
squares is constantly being turned over with wooden shovels by bare- 
footed negroes who think nothing of wading through it ; here and 
there one passes a warehouse in which chattering old women sit thigh- 
deep in coffee, clawing over the berries with their fleshless black talons. 
Its market-place is large and presents the usual chaos of wares and 
hubbub of bargaining; its blue vaulted cathedral easily proves its an- 
tiquity, and American marines are everywhere in evidence. On the 
whole, its populace is somewhat less ragged than that of Port au Prince, 
but whatever it lacks in picturesqueness is made up for by the view of 
its surrounding mountains crowned by the great Citadel of Christophe. 

Election day came during our stay at " the Cape." In olden times 
such an event was worth coming far to see, provided one could keep out 
of the frequent melees accompanying it. Under the Americans it is 
tame in the extreme. To obviate the necessity of counting more votes 
than there are inhabitants, the marines have introduced a plan charm- 
ing in its simplicity. As he casts his ballot, each voter is required to 
dip the end of his right forefinger in a solution of nitrate of silver. 
The nail of course turns black, for the finger-nails even of a negro are 
ordinarily light colored, — and remains so until election day is over. 
Far be it from me to suggest that such a scheme might be adopted to 
advantage in our own country. A few district commanders, to make 
doubly sure, use iodine. The rank and file accept this formality as 
cheerfully as they do every other incomprehensible requirement of their 
new white rulers, most of them making the sign of the cross with the 
wet finger. But the haughty "gens de couleur" are apt to protest 
loudly against this " implied insult to my honor," and if they can catch 
the American official off his guard, are sure to dip in the wrong finger 
or merely make a false pass over the liquid, meanwhile scowling into 
silence the low-caste native watchers. 

Haiti has long dreamed of some day uniting the several bits of minia- 
ture railroad scattered about the country into a single line between the 
two principal cities. The existing section in the north, twenty odd 
miles in length, connects Cap Haitien with Grande Riviere and Bahon. 
Its fares, like those of the equally primitive lines out of Port au Prince, 
are so low that for once the assertions of the owners that they lose 
money on passengers can be accepted without a grin of incredulity. 
To raise them, however, is not so simple a matter as it may seem, for 
the Haitian masses are little inclined as it is to part with their rare 
gourdes for the mere privilege of saving their calloused feet. There 



180 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

were far more travelers along the broad highway out of " the Cape " 
than in the little cars themselves in which we followed it through a 
region that might have been highly productive had it been as diligently 
tended by man as by nature. The train stopped frequently and long 
at forest-choked clusters of negro huts varying only in size. Such 
scenes had grown so commonplace that we found more of interest in the 
car itself, particularly among the marines who sprawled over several of 
the seats. The majority of our forces of occupation are so decidedly 
a credit to their country that it needed the contrast of such types as 
these to explain why the " Gooks," as the natives are popularly known 
among their class, generally resent our presence on Haitian soil. Loud- 
mouthed, profane, constantly passing around a grass-bound gallon 
bottle of rum, and boasting of their conquests among the negro girls, 
they were far less agreeable traveling companions than the blackest of 
the natives. Their " four years' cruise in Hate-eye," one would have 
supposed in listening to them, was a constant round of these things and 
" fighting chickens," with an occasional opportunity of " putting a lot 
of families in mourning " thrown in. Yet underneath it all they were 
good-hearted, cheerful, and generous, despite the notion prevalent 
among too many Americans that boisterousness and rowdyism is a 
proof of courage and manhood. 

Grande Riviere is a town of some consequence in Haiti, prettily situ- 
ated in a river valley among green hills. Its grassy place and the 
unfailing " patrie" in its center are decided improvements on most of 
those in the republic ; the several large church bells under a roof of 
their own at some distance from the building itself still retain their 
musical French voices. A dyewood establishment is its chief single in- 
dustry. The crooked logwood, carved down to the red heart before it 
leaves the forests, is gnawed to bits by a noisy machine, boiled in a suc- 
cession of vats, the red water running off through sluiceways, and the 
waste tossed out to dry and serve as fuel, and the concentrated product, 
thick as molasses, is inclosed in barrels for shipment. Scarcely an hour 
passes between the picking up of a log and the rolling away of the 
barrel containing its extract. 

But of all the sights in any Haitian town the market-place is surest 
to attract the idle traveler. It was Saturday, or beef day, and two 
long lines of venders were dispensing mere nibbles of meat to the 
clamoring throng of purchasers, no portion of the animal being too 
uninviting to escape consumption. Of a hundred little squares on the 
ground dotted with " piles " of miscellaneous wares the inventory we 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 181 

made of one is characteristic of all, and its sum total of value probably 
did not reach two dollars. There were long, square strips of yellow 
soap, brooms and ropes made of jungle plants, castor-beans (the oil 
from which is used in native lamps), unhulled rice, all kinds of woven 
things from baskets to saddle-bags, peanuts, green plantains, pitch-pine 
kindling for torches, huge sheets of cassava bread, folded twice, rock 
salt, gay calicoes, all tropical fruits, unground pepper, old nails, loose 
matches, cinnamon bark, peanut and jijimi sweets, pewter spoons, scis- 
sors, thread, little marbles of blue dye, unassorted buttons, cheap knives, 
safety-pins, yarn, tiny red clay pipes and the reed stems to go with 
them, rusted square spikes of the kind used a century ago, shelled corn, 
ground corn, pititui, several kinds of beans, tiny scraps of leather, four 
tin cans from a marine messroom, five bottles of as many shapes and 
sizes, one old shoe, and a handful of red berries used in Haiti as beads. 

A bare five days from New York stands the most massive, probably 
the most impressive single ruin in America. One might go farther and 
say that there are few man-built structures in Europe that can equal 
in mightiness and in the extraordinary difficulties overcome in its con- 
struction this chief sight of the West Indies. Only the pyramids of 
Egypt, in at least the familiar regions of the earth, can compare with 
this gigantic monument to the strength and perseverance of puny man, 
and the pyramids are built down on the floor of the earth instead of 
being borne aloft to the tiptop of a mountain. It is curious, yet sym- 
bolical of our ignorance of the neighbors of our own hemisphere, that 
while most Americans know of far less remarkable structures in Europe, 
not one in a hundred of us has ever hea - d of the great Haitian Citadel 
of Christophe. 

We caught our first view of it from " the Cape." The January day 
had broken in a flood of tropical sunshine, which brought out every 
crack and wrinkle of the long mountain-range cutting its jagged outline 
in the Haitian sky to the southward of the city. On the top of its high- 
est peak, called the " Bishop's Bonnet," stood forth a square-cut summit 
which only the preinformed could have believed was the work of man. 
Twenty-five miles away it looked like an enormous hack in the mountain 
itself, a curious natural formation which man could never have imi- 
tated except on a tiny scale. It is a standing joke in Cap Haitien to 
listen in all solemnity to newcomers laughing to scorn the assertions of 
the residents that this distant mountain summit was fashioned by human 
hands. 



i82 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Now and again as we journeyed toward it on the little railroad to 
Grande Riviere we had a glimpse of the citadel through the dense tropi- 
cal vegetation, yet so slowly did it increase in size that its massiveness 
became all the more incredible. Where we descended at a cross-trail 
in the forest a group of small Haitian horses was already awaiting us. 
The gendarme officer in charge of them was a powerful young American 
beside whom a native of the color known as griff 'e, in civilian garb, 
looked like a half-grown boy. For the pilots assigned us on this excur- 
sion were none other than Captain Hanneken and Jean Batiste, now 
Lieutenant, Conze, the exterminators of Charlemagne. 

The trail broke out at length into a wide clearing which stretched 
away as far as the eye could follow in each direction, its grassy surface 
cut up by several wandering paths along which plodded a few natives 
and a donkey or two. It was once the " royal highway " between Chris- 
tophe's main palace and Cap Haitien, outdoing in width the broadest 
boulevards of Europe. An hour or more along this brought us to 
Milot, a small town lined up on each side of the road like people 
awaiting a procession of royalty. At the back of it the highway ended 
at a great crumbling ruin which had about it something suggestive of 
Versailles. 

Christophe's palace of Sans Souci, for such it was, is wholly unin- 
habitable to-day, yet there is still enough of it standing to indicate that 
it was once one of the most ornate and commodious structures in the 
western hemisphere. Two pairs of mammoth gate-posts, square in 
form and nearly twenty feet high, guard the entrance to the lower yard- 
platform, bounded by a heavy stone wall. On the inside these are hol- 
lowed out into unexpected sentry-boxes, for Christophe was a strong 
believer in many guards. Higher up, sustained by a still stronger wall, 
is another grassy platform, from which a stairway as broad and elabo- 
rate as any trodden by European sovereigns leads sidewise to a balus- 
traded entrance court, also flanked by sentry-boxes. Crumbling walls 
in which many small bushes have found a foothold tower high aloft 
above this to where they are broken off in jagged irregularity. The 
palace was evidently five stories high, built of native brick and plaster, 
and the architecture is still impressive despite its dilapidated condition 
and for all its African-minded ostentation. The roof has completely 
given way, and in the vast halls of the lower floor grow wild oranges 
and tropical bush. Those higher up, of which only the edges of the 
floors and the walls remain, are said to have included a great ball-room, 
an immense billiard-hall, separate suites for the emperor and his black 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 183 

consort, and apartments for the immediate royal family. At some dis- 
tance from the palace proper stand the lower walls of the former lodg- 
ings of minor princes, a host of courtiers, the stables, and the caserns. 
The several parterres, once covered with rare flowers watered by irri- 
gating canals, are mere tangles of jungle. The caimite-tree under 
which the black tyrant is said to have sat in judgment on his subjects, 
after the example of Louis IX of France, still casts its mammoth shade 
in the back courtyard ; a small chapel lower down that was probably 
used by the lesser nobles serves Milot as a church ; with those excep- 
tions there is little left as Christophe saw it. Our forces of occupation 
are threatening to tear down the walls, which are soon likely to fall of 
themselves, to clear away the vegetation, and to build barracks of the 
materials that remain. 

The narrow trail that zigzags from the back of the palace up the 
mountain may not be the one by which those condemned under the 
caimite-tree were carried or dragged to their death before the ram- 
parts of the citadel, but there remain no evidences of any other route. 
Much of the way it is all but impassable even during a lull in the rainy 
season, for the dense vegetation shuts out the sun that might otherwise 
harden the mud in which the hardiest native horses frequently wallow 
belly-deep and now and then give up in frank despair. For a time it 
leads through banana- and mango-groves, with huts swarming with 
negro babies here and there peering forth from the thick undergrowth ; 
higher still there is a bit of coffee, but the last two thirds of the jour- 
ney upward is wholly uninhabited. Only once or twice in the ascent 
does one catch a glimpse of the goal until one emerges from a brown 
jungle of giant grasses, to find its grim gray walls towering sheer over- 
head. 

Before this mammoth structure the memory of Sans Souci sinks into 
insignificance. As the latter is ornate and cheerful in architecture, the 
citadel is savage in its unadorned masculine strength. The mighty stone 
walls, twenty feet thick in many cases, are square-cut and formidable 
in their great unbroken surfaces. The northern side is red with fungus, 
the rest merely weather-dulled. Even the cannon of to-day would find 
them worthy adversaries. Time, which has wrought such havoc on the 
palace at the mountain's foot, has scarcely made an impression on the 
exterior of this cyclopean structure, and even within only the wooden 
portions have given way. Great iron-studded doors groaning on their 
mammoth hinges give admittance to an endless labyrinth of gloomy 
chambers, dungeon-like in all but their astonishing size. Cannon of 



184 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the largest makes known when the fortress was constructed are to be 
found everywhere, some of them still pointing dizzily out their em- 
brasures, stretching in row after row of superimposed batteries, others 
lying where the rotting of their heavy wooden supports has left them. 
Many bear the royal arms of Spain's most famous monarchs, several 
those of Queen Elizabeth, and the rest evidences of English and French 
origin. Tradition has it that Christophe mounted three hundred and 
sixty-five cannon of large caliber in the citadel, and it is small wonder 
that his successors have not had the courage to attempt to remove them. 
The imagination grows numb and helpless at the thought of transport- 
ing these immense weapons by mere man power to the summit of a steep 
mountain three thousand feet above the plain below. Yet not only 
these, but the uncounted mammoth blocks of stone of which the acres of 
thick walls are constructed, the mortars, the iron chests, the smaller 
cannon, the heaps of huge iron cannon-supports, the pyramids of cannon- 
balls that are found wherever the footsteps turn in the clammy chambers 
or the jungle-grown courtyards, were all brought here by sheer force 
of human arms. 

Higher and higher the visitor mounts by great dank stairways through 
story after story of immense rooms, the vaulted stone ceilings of a few 
partly fallen in, most of them wholly intact, all dedicated to the grim 
business of war, to come out at last in an upper courtyard with the ruins 
of a chapel and the mammoth stone vault in which Christophe lies 
buried. Some of the marvels of the place are the stone basins always 
full of clear running water, the source of which no man has ever been 
able to discover. Here the group of prisoners whom the captain had 
sent ahead with the paraphernalia and provisions for an elaborate picnic 
lunch were shivering in their thin striped garments until their black 
faces seemed to be blurred of outline. Yet they had less cause to 
tremble than their fellows of a century ago who were herded in this 
same inclosure to await their turn for being thrown from the ramparts 
above. For such was Christophe's favorite method of capital punish- 
ment. The thro wing-off place is a long stone platform ten feet wide 
at the very top of the citadel. From its edge the sheer wall drops to a 
sickening depth before it joins the mountain-slope almost as steep, 
forming that great hack in the summit which looks from " the Cape " 
like a natural precipice. Men hurled from this height must have fallen 
nearly a thousand feet before they struck the bushy boulder-strewn 
face of the mountain, down which their mutilated remains bounded and 
slid to where they brought up against a ledge of rock or a larger bush, 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 185 

there to He until their whitened bones crumbled into dust. Multitudes 
of his subjects are said to have met this fate under the black tyrant, 
some in punishment for real crimes, more for having unintentionally 
aroused his enmity or to satisfy his whims. The story goes that Chris- 
tophe and his British ambassador once got into a friendly argument on 
the subject of soldierly discipline. The black emperor contended that 
there was no order which his troops would not unhesitatingly obey, 
and to prove his point he led his guest to the top of the citadel, where 
he set a company to drilling and at a given command caused it to march 
oft the edge of the wall. This particular tale should perhaps be taken 
with a grain of salt, but there is unquestionable evidence of similar play- 
ful acts on the part of the heartless monarch. 

Once the visitor can withdraw his eyes from the jagged Golgotha 
below, the view spread out before him is rivaled by few in the world. 
All Haiti seems to be visible in every detail : the ocean, the entire course 
of meandering rivers, high mountains, deep valleys, a sea of greenery, 
form a circular panorama bounded only by the limitless horizon. Little 
houses in tiny clearings on the plain below, a dozen towns and villages, 
" the Cape," Ouanaminthe, even the hills of Santo Domingo, stand 
forth as clearly as if they were only a bare mile away, some flashing 
in the tropical sunshine, others dulled by the great cloud shadows crawl- 
ing languidly across the landscape. 

Henri Christophe was a full-blooded negro who passed the early days 
of his life as the slave of a French planter. When the blacks rose 
against their masters he led the revolt on his own plantation and quickly 
avenged his years of bondage. Serving first as a common soldier under 
Toussaint l'Ouverture, he rose to the rank of general and became one of 
the chief supporters of Dessalines. The assassination of the latter in 
1806 left Christophe commander-in-chief of the Haitian forces and led 
to his election as the first President of Haiti. His first official act was 
to protest against the newly adopted constitution on the ground that it 
did not give him sufficient power. Civil war broke out between him 
and the mulatto general Petion, who drove him into the north and 
became president in his place, leaving Christophe the official ranking of 
an outlaw. Petion, however, was never able to conquer his rival. Pro- 
claiming himself president under a new constitution drawn up by an 
assembly of his own choosing, the rebel took possession of the northern 
half of the country and ruled it for thirteen long years with one of the 
bloodiest hands known to history. 

In 181 1 he -proclaimed himself king, honored his black consort with 



186 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the title of queen, and proceeded to form a Haitian nobility consisting 
of his own numerous children as " princes of the royal blood," three 
" princes of the kingdom," eight' " dukes," twenty " counts," thirty- 
seven " barons," and eleven " chevaliers," each and all of them former 
slaves or the descendants of slaves. These jet-black " nobles," many 
of whom added to their titles the names of such native towns as Li- 
monade, Marmalade, and the like, soon became the laughing-stock of 
more advanced civilizations, though candor forces the admission that 
Christophe was only following the example of those who ennobled the 
robber barons of Europe in earlier centuries, with the slight difference 
in the matter of complexions. As " King Henry " he surrounded him- 
self with all the pomp and ceremony of royalty, erected nine palaces, 
of which Sans Souci was the most magnificent and the only one that has 
not completely disappeared, built eight royal chateaux, maintained great 
stables of horses and royal coaches, innumerable retainers and servants, 
and a tremendous bodyguard. Later, feeling that he had not done him- 
self full honor, he named himself hereditary emperor under the title 
of " Henri I," and having come within an ace of conquering the entire 
country, settled down to govern his portion of it in a manner that would 
have been the envy of Nero. 

The name of Christophe, in so far as it is known at all, is synony- 
mous with unbridled brutality. Yet there is a certain violent virtue 
in the efforts by which the ex-slave sought to force his unprogressive 
black subjects to climb the slippery ladder of civilization. He founded 
schools, distributed the estates of the exiled Frenchmen among the 
veterans of his army, reestablished commercial relations with England 
and the United States, created workshops in which the word " can't " 
was taboo. His methods were simple and direct. Causing a French 
carriage to be placed at the disposition of his workmen, he ordered them 
to produce another exactly like it within a fortnight on pain of death. 
Similar tasks were meted out in all lines of endeavor, the tyrant refus- 
ing to admit that what white men could do his black subjects could not 
do also. His despotism, however, was not bounded by the mere desire 
for advancement. When he passed, the people were compelled to kneel, 
and death was the portion of the man who dared look upon his face 
without permission. Thievery he abhorred, and inflicted capital punish- 
ment for the mere stealing of a chicken. It came to be a regular part 
of his daily life to order men, women, and even children thrown from 
the summit of the citadel. 

Tradition asserts that thirty thousand of his black subjects perished 



IN THE HAITIAN BUSH 187 

in the building of this chief monument to his ambition. All the French 
and Belgian architects and the skilled mechanics who worked on it are 
said to have been assassinated when it was finished. The tale is still 
going the rounds in Haiti that the emperor once came upon a gang of 
workmen idling about one of the massive blocks of stone destined for 
the citadel above, and demanded the reason for their inaction. 

"It is too heavy, Sire," replied the workmen; "we cannot carry it 
to the mountain-top." 

" Line up," ordered the tyrant ; then turning to his bodyguard, he 
commanded, " Shoot every fourth man. Perhaps you will feel stronger 
now," he remarked to the survivors as he rode onward. 

On his return, however, the stone was no higher up the hill. 

" It is quite impossible, your Majesty," gasped the foreman; "it will 
not budge." 

' Throw that man from the precipice," said the despot, " and repeat 
the order of this morning." 

The remaining workmen, according to the tale, succeeded in carrying 
the stone to its destination. 

Such stories always hover about those mighty monuments that seem 
impossible without supernatural aid, yet no one who has beheld the suc- 
cess with which the forces of gravity have been derided in this incred- 
ible undertaking, incredible even in the enormousness of the structure 
itself without taking into account its extraordinary situation, will ques- 
tion its cost in such details as a few thousand more or less human lives. 
Obsessed with the idea that the French would try to reconquer the 
country, Christophe had resolved to erect a stronghold that would be 
an impregnable place of resistance against them, or at worst a " nest- 
egg of liberty," which would afford certain refuge to the defenseurs 
de la patrie until better days dawned for them. There he stored vast 
quantities of grain and food, of ammunition, flints, bullets, powder, 
soggy heaps of which are still to be found, clothing, tools, and a gold 
reserve amounting to more than thirty million dollars. His enemies 
saw in the citadel only a pretext to indulge his innate barbarism, to 
decimate his people for the mere pleasure of playing Nero. It may be 
that this is not a just verdict. Christophe felt that he incarnated the 
soul of his black brethren and that belief made him wholly insensible 
to any other consideration. The mere fact that his lack of perspective 
and his ignorance of such details as the feeding of a long-besieged gar- 
rison made his seemingly impregnable fortress an utter waste of effort 
may speak poorly for the instruction which his French masters gave 



188 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

him, but it does not belittle the actual accomplishment of his superhuman 
undertaking. 

Christophe as violently died as he had lived. Stricken with apoplexy 
in the church of Limonade, he attempted to cure himself by heroic 
measures, such as rum and red-pepper baths. Finding this of no avail 
and refusing to outlive his despotic power over his subjects, he shot 
himself through the head. Barely was his body cold, if we are to be- 
lieve current stories, when his officers and retainers sacked the palace 
of Sans Souci in which it lay, the wealth of many Haitian families of 
this day being based on the spoils from this and his other royal resi- 
dences. The corpse was carried to the citadel and covered with quick 
lime, but tradition asserts that it retained its life-like appearance for 
many years afterward and was on view to all who cared to peer through 
the glass heading of the vault until a later ruler decreed this exposition 
" indecent," and ordered the remains to be covered with earth. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 

OUANAMINTHE is the Haitian " Creole " name for a town 
which the Spaniards founded under the more euphonious 
title of Juana Mendez. It is the eastern frontier station for 
those who travel overland by the northern route from Haiti to Santo 
Domingo. We might have been stranded there indefinitely but for the 
already familiar kindness of our fellow-countrymen in uniform who are 
scattered throughout the negro republic. Public conveyances are un- 
known in Ouanaminthe. Strangers are more than rare, and the natives 
trust to their own broad, hoof-like feet. Walking is all very well for a 
lone bachelor with no other cares than a half-filled knapsack. But with 
a wife to consider, the long trail loses something of its primitive sim- 
plicity ; moreover there sat our baggage staring us in the face with a 
contrite, don't-abandon-me air. In what would otherwise have been 
our sad predicament, Captain Verner, commanding the gendarmerie of 
Ouanaminthe, came to our rescue most delicately with the assertion that 
he had long been planning to run over to Monte Cristi on a pressing 
matter of business. 

The captain's Ford — his own, be it noted in passing, lest some com- 
mittee of investigation prick up its ears — was soon swimming the 
frontier river Massacre with that amphibean ease which the adaptable 
" flivver " quickly acquires in the often bridgeless West Indies. The 
change from one civilization to another — or should I call them two 
attempts toward civilization ? — was as sudden, as astonishingly abrupt, 
as the dash through the apparently unfordable stream. Dajabon, 
strewn from the sandy crest of the eastern bank to the arid plains 
beyond, reminded us at once of Cuba ; to my own .mind it brought back 
the memory of hundreds of Spanish-American towns scattered down 
the western hemisphere from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. With one 
slight exception the island of Santo Domingo is the only one in the 
New World that is divided between two nationalities ; it is the only one 
on earth, unless my geography be at fault, where the rank and file speak 
two different languages. Yet the shallow Massacre is as definite a 
dividing line as though it were a hundred leagues of sea. 

189 



190 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Unlike the Haitian shacks behind us, the dwellings of Dajabon were 
almost habitable, even to the exacting Northern point of view. Instead 
of tattered and ludicrously patched negroes of bovine temperament 
lolling in the shade of as ragged' hovels of palm-leaves and jungle rub- 
bish, comparatively well-dressed men and women, ranging in com- 
plexion from light brown to pale yellow, sat in chairs on projecting 
verandas or leaned on their elbows in open windows, staring with 
that fixed attention which makes the most hardened stranger self- 
conscious in Spanish-America, yet which, contrasted with the vacant 
black faces of Haiti, was an evidence at least of human intelligence 
and curiosity. The village girls, decked out in their Sunday-afternoon 
best, were often attractive in appearance, some undeniably pretty, quali- 
ties which only an observer of African ancestry could by any stretch 
of generosity grant to the belles of the Haitian bourgs behind us. 

Even the change in landscape was striking. Whether the Spaniard 
colonized by choice those regions which remind him of the dry and 
rarely shaded plains of his own Castille and Aragon, or because he 
makes way with a forest wherever he sees one, he is more apt than not 
to be surrounded by bare, brown, semi-arid vistas. Haiti had, on the 
whole, been densely wooded ; luxuriant vegetation, plentifully watered, 
spread away on every hand. The great plain that stretched out before 
us beyond Dajabon was almost treeless; except for a scattering of 
withered, thorny bushes, there was scarcely a growing thing. The 
rainfall that had been so frequent in the land of the blacks behind us 
seemed not to have crossed the frontier in months. In contrast to 
caco-impoverished Haiti, large herds of cattle wandered about the brown 
immensity, or huddled in the rare pretenses of shade ; but what they 
found to feed on was a mystery, for there was nothing in the scarce, 
scanty patches of sun-burned herbage that could have been dignified 
with the name of grass. Even where something resembling a forest 
appeared farther on it turned out to be a dismal wilderness of dwarf 
trees with spiny trunks and savage thorny branches without a sug- 
gestion of undergrowth or ground plants beneath them. Dead, flat, 
monotonous, made doubly mournful by the occasional moan of a wild 
dove, a more dreary, uninspiring landscape it would be hard to imagine ; 
the vista that spread away as far as the eye could see seemed wholly 
uninviting to human habitation. 

It must be an unpromising region, however, that does not produce 
at least its crop of mankind. Clusters of thrown-together huts, little 
less miserable in these rural districts, it must be admitted, than those 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 191 

of Haiti, jolted past us now and then, their swarms of stark-naked 
children of eight, ten, and even twelve years of age scampering out 
across the broken, sun-hardened ground to see us pass. Yet in one 
respect at least even these denizens of the wilderness were superior to 
their Haitian prototypes — they really spoke their native language. 
Familiar as we had both been for years with French, it was rare indeed 
that we got more than the general drift of a conversation in Haitian 
" creole." The most uneducated dominicano, on the other hand, spoke 
a Spanish almost as clear and precise as that heard in the streets of 
Madrid. There must be something enduring, something that appeals 
to the most uncouth tongue, in the Castilian language. Hear it where 
you will, in all the broad expanse of Central and South America, in 
the former Spanish colonies of the West Indies, from the lips of 
Indians, negroes, mestizos, or the Jews of the Near East, banished from 
Spain centuries ago, with minor variations of pronunciation and enrich- 
ing of vocabulary from the tongues it has supplanted, it retains almost 
its original purity. What a hybrid of incomprehensible noises French, 
on the other hand, becomes in the mouths of slaves and savages we had 
all too often had impressed upon us in Haiti, and were due to have the 
lesson repeated in the French islands of the Lesser Antilles. Even our 
own English cannot stand the wear and tear of isolation and slovenly 
vocal processes with anything like the success of the Castilian. The 
speech of Canada and of Barbados, closely as those two lands are 
linked to the same mother country, seem almost two distinct languages. 
But if the Dominicans spoke their language more purely, their voices 
had none of the soft, almost musical tones of the negroes beyond the 
Massacre. There was a brittle, metallic, nerve-jarring twang to their 
speech that was almost as unpleasant as the high-pitched chatter of 
Cuban women. 

If we noted all these differences between the two divisions of the 
island, there was another that impressed us far more forcibly at the 
moment. In all our jolting over the roads of Haiti, good, bad, and 
unspeakable, we had never once been delayed by so much as a puncture. 
In the first mile out of Dajabon we were favored with four separate 
and distinct blow-outs. The twenty-eight miles between the frontier 
and Monte Cristi — for it is best to hear the worst at once — netted 
no fewer than ten! 

It was shortly after the fifth, if my memory is not failing, that the 
open plain gave way to a thorn-bristling wilderness through which had 
been cut a roadway a generous twenty feet wid.e — shortly after cer- 



192 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tainly, otherwise the sixth blow-out would have intervened. I use 
the term roadway advisedly, for road there was really none. The 
Dominican scorns the building of highways as thoroughly as do any 
of his cousins o.f Spanish descent. With American intervention he 
was forced, much against his will and better judgment, to divert a 
certain amount of public moneys and labor to making wheeled com- 
munication between his various provinces possible. But though you 
can drive an unbridled horse along any open space, you cannot choose 
the path he shall make within it. Wide as it was, the roadway was 
an. unbroken expanse of deeply cracked and thoroughly churned brown 
mud, sun-burned to the consistency of broken rock. Along this the first 
traveler after the long forgotten rains had squirmed and waded his 
way where the mud was shallowest, with the result that the only 
semblance to a road wandered back and forth across the misshapen 
roadway like a Spanish " river " in its ludicrously over-ample bed. 

Here and there we were forced to crawl along the extreme edge of 
one or the other of the bristling walls of vegetation; frequently the 
only passable trail left the roadway entirely and squirmed off through 
the spiny forest, the thorny branches whipping us in the faces. Huge 
clumps of organ cactus and others of the same family forced us to 
make precarious detours. At the top of a faint rise we sighted the 
" Morro " of Monte Cristi, a great bulking rectangular hill that guides 
the mariner both by land and sea to the most western port of Santo 
Domingo. Our hopes began slowly to revive when — " Groughung ! " 
the sixth mishap befell us — or was it the seventh? I remember that 
the eighth overtook us at the bottom of the rise, when both daylight 
and our patches were giving out. The ninth found us in total dark- 
ness, and disclosed the fact that there was not a match on board. The 
lamps of the car had ceased to function months before; one does not 
Ford it by night in the island of Santo Domingo except upon extreme 
provocation. A hut discovered back in the bush was likewise match- 
less, but the supper fire on the ground beside it still had a few glowing 
embers. While Rachel held the blaze of one of those dried hollow reeds 
that do duty as torches in Santo Domingo as near us as was prudent, 
we improvised a patch that would have caused an experienced chauffeur 
to gasp with astonishment. Each rustling of the thorny brush about 
us drew our fixed attention. There are bandits in Santo Domingo as 
well as in Haiti, and they have far less reputation for making speed to 
the rear. The captain carried a revolver, an American Marine being 
equally at home in either of the island republics. But the danger of 




The Plaza and clock tower of Monte Cristo, showing its American bullet hole 




Railroading in Santo Domingo 




The tri-weekly train arrives at Santiago 




Dominican guardians 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 193 

international complications had prevented his black gendarme assistant 
from bringing with him the rifle that might be badly needed. My 
visions of losing a congenial companion were vastly enhanced once 
when a crashing in the bushes caused us to whirl about on the defensive. 
A stray cow ambled past us and away into the black night. 

With the tenth mishap, lightless and patchless, we lost the final 
remnants of patience and forced our sorry steed to hobble along on 
three feet. The road had a pleasant little way of eluding us when least 
expected, and a dozen times within the next hour we brought up 
against the forest wall, finding our way again only by the sense of 
touch. Then at last appeared a flicker of light. But it was only the 
hamlet on the bank of the River Yaque, across which we must be 
ferried on what looked in the darkness like the top of a soap-box. 
Fortunately it takes little to float a Ford. Our crippled charger stag- 
gered up the steep bank beyond this principal stream of northern 
Santo Domingo, and a half hour later we rattled into the considerable 
town of Monte Cristi. 

Its streets were as wide as the hilltop roadway behind us, but like it 
they had only reached the first stage of development. Worst of all 
we were forced to run the full length of nearly every one of them in 
the vain quest of some suggestion of hostelry. Our predicament would 
have been one to bring salt tears to the most hardened eyes but for 
the saving grace of all the island of Santo Domingo — our own people 
in uniform. Barely had we -discovered the commander-in-chief of 
Monte Cristi, a Marine captain bearing the name of one of our early 
and illustrious Presidents, than he broke all records in hospitality within 
our own experience by turning his entire house over to us. We were 
never more firmly convinced of the wisdom of American intervention 
in Santo Domingo than at the end of that explosive day. 

The otherwise dark and deserted, town was gathered in its best 
starched attire in the place where any Spanish-American town would 
naturally be on a Sunday evening — in the central plaza. This, to 
begin with, was strikingly unlike the bare open squares of Haiti, 
with their unfailing tribune-and-palm-tree " patrie." First of all, it 
was well paved, an assertion that could not be made of any other spot 
in town. An elaborate iron fence surrounded it, comfortable benches 
were ranged about it, trees and flowering shrubs shaded it by day and 
decorated it by night, the only public lights in town cast an unwonted 
brilliancy upon the promenading populace, circling slowly round and 



194 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

round the square, the two sexes in opposite directions, their voices 
and footsteps half drowning the not too successful efforts of a group 
of misfitted males in the center of the plaza to produce musical sounds. 
It was as typically Spanish a scene as the deserted barren place, with 
the weird beating of tomtoms floating across it, is indigenous to the 
republic of Haiti. 

It was not until morning, however, .that we caught full sight of the 
chief feature of the plaza and the pride of Monte Cristi. By daylight 
a monument we had only vaguely sensed in the night stood forth in all 
its dubious beauty. In the center of the now deserted plaza rose a near 
replica of the Eiffel Tower, its open-work steel frame crowned by a 
large four-faced clock some fifty feet above our dizzy heads. Well 
might the Monte Cristians pride themselves on a feature quite unique 
among the plazas of the world. 

From this clock tower hangs a tale that is too suggestive of Dominican 
character to be passed over in silence. Some years ago, before the 
intrusive Americans came to put an end to the national sport, a candi- 
date for the Dominican Congress came parading his candidacy about 
the far corners of the country. In each town he promised, in return 
for their aid in seating him in the august assembly, that the citizens 
should have federal funds for whatever was most lacking to their civic 
happiness. Monte Cristi, being farthest from the cynical capital of 
any community in Santo Domingo, took the politician seriously. The 
town put its curly heads together and decided that what it most wanted 
was — not a real school building to take the place of the rented hut 
in which its children fail to learn the rudiments of the three R's, nor 
yet pavements for some of the sandhills that are disguised under the 
name of streets. What it felt the need of more than anything else was 
a town clock that would cast envy on all its rivals for many miles 
around. The politician approved the choice so thoroughly that he ad- 
vised the opening of negotiations for its purchase at once, without 
waiting for the mere formality of congressional sanction. In due 
time the monstrosity was erected. But for some reason the newly 
elected congressman's influence with his fellow-members was not so 
paramount as his faithful supporters had been led to believe. Some 
of them still contend that he did actually introduce a resolution to pro- 
vide the noble and patriotic pueblo of Monte Cristi with a prime neces- 
sity in the shape of a community time-piece ; if so the bill died in com- 
mittee, unattended by priest or physician. For months Monte Cristi 
bombarded the far-off capital with doleful petitions, until at length, 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 195 

with the sudden coming of the Americans, congress itself succumbed, 
and the two thousand or so good citizens of the hapless town found 
themselves face to face with a document — bearing a foreign place of 
issue at that, caramba ! — reading succinctly : 

"To one clock and tower, Dr $16,000 

Please Remit" 

To cap the climax, the ridiculous Americans who had taken in charge 
the revenues of the country brought with them the absurd doctrine that 
municipalities should pay their bills. Years have passed since the 
successful politician visited the northwest corner of the country, yet 
Monte Cristi is only beginning to crawl from beneath its appalling 
clock tower, financially speaking, and to catch its breath again after 
relief from so oppressive a burden. Small wonder that her sand-hill 
streets are unpaved and that her children still crowd into a rented hovel 
to glean the rudiments of learning. 

But the history of the famous clock tower does not end there. Those 
who glance at the top-heavy structure from the south are struck by a 
jagged hole just above the face of the dial, midway between the XII 
and the I. It is so obviously a bullet-hole that the observer could not 
fail to show surprise were it not that bullet-holes are as universal in 
Santo Domingo as fighting cocks. Thereby hangs another tale. 

In the early days of American occupation the choice of commanders 
of the Guardia Nacional detachment in Monte Cristi was not always 
happy. It was natural, too, that a group of marine officers, bubbling 
over with youth, sentenced to pass month after month in a somnolent 
Dominican village, should have found it difficult to devise fitting 
amusement for their long leisure hours. Pastimes naturally reduced 
themselves to the exchange of poker chips and the consumption of 
certain beverages supposedly taboo in all American circles and doubly 
so in the Marine Corps. The power of Dominican joy-water to pro- 
duce hilarity is far-famed. It came to be the custom of the winning 
card player to express his exuberance by drawing his automatic and 
firing several shots over his head. This means of expression would 
have been startling enough to the disarmed Dominicans had the games 
been played in the open air with the sun above the horizon. But the 
rendezvous was naturally within doors, usually in the dwelling of the 
commander, and the climax was commonly reached at an hour when 
all reputable natives were wrapped in slumber. The sheet-iron roof 
that sheltered us during our night in Monte Cristi corroborated the 



196 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

testimony of the inhabitants that they had frequently sprung from 
their beds convinced that yet another revolution was upon them. 

One night a difference of opinion arose among the players as to the 
hour that should be set for the cashing in of chips. The commander 
offered to settle the problem in an equitable manner. Stepping to the 
door, he raised his automatic toward the famous $16,000 clock and 
fired. The decision was made ; the game ended at twelve : thirty. It 
is not particularly strange under the circumstances that the inhabitants 
of Monte Cristi are not extraordinarily fond of Americans or of 
marine occupation. 

The mail coach — in real life the inevitable Ford — left Monte Cristi 
the morning after our arrival, obviating the necessity of wiring to 
Santiago for a private car. The fare was within reason, as such things 
go in the West Indies — sixteen dollars for a journey of some eighty 
miles — and despite the pessimistic prophecies of our host we had 
the back seat to ourselves the entire distance. Our driver, of dull- 
brown hue, was of the same quick, nervous temperament as his Cuban 
cousins, and scurried away at thirty miles an hour over " roads " which 
few American chauffeurs would venture along at ten. Yet he was sur- 
prisingly successful in avoiding undue jolts; so often had he driven 
this incredibly rough-and-tumble route that he knew exactly when and 
where to slow up for each dry arroyo, to dodge protruding boulders or 
dangerous sand beds, to drop from one level to another without crack- 
ing a spring or an axle. The machine was innocent of muffler, hence it 
needed no horn, and as an official conveyance it yielded the road to no 
one, except the few placid carts whose safety lay in their massiveness. 

Many miles of the journey were sandy barren wastes producing only 
dismal thorn-bristling dwarf forests. Every now and then we dodged 
from one wide caricature of a road to another still more choppy and 
rock-strewn ; occasionally we found a mile or two of tolerable highway. 
The scarcity of travelers was in striking contrast to Haiti. The few 
people we met were never on foot, but in clumsy carts or astride gaunt, 
but hardy, little horses. Houses of woven palm-leaves, on bare, reddish, 
hard soil sheltered the poorer inhabitants ; the better-to-do built their 
dwellings of split palm trunks that had the appearance of clapboards. 
Villages were rare, and isolated houses wholly lacking. Outdoor mud 
ovens on stilts, with rude thatched roofs over them, adorned nearly 
every back or side yard. At each village we halted before a roughly 
constructed post office to exchange mailbags with a postmaster who in 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 197 

the majority of cases showed no visible negro strain. Pure white in- 
habitants were frequent in the larger pueblos ; full-blooded African 
types extremely rare. Santo Domingo has been called a mulatto coun- 
try; we found it more nearly a land of quadroons. 

What even the sparse population lived on was not apparent, for 
almost nowhere were people working in the fields, and the towns seemed 
to be chiefly inhabited by fairly well-dressed loafers, or at best by 
lolling shop-keepers. Probably they existed by selling things to one 
another. The stocks of the over-numerous shops were amply supplied 
with bottled goods, but with comparatively little else, and that chiefly 
tinned food from the United States. No old sugar kettles, no ruined 
French estates, no negro women in broad straw hats or slippers flap- 
ping with the gait of their donkeys, no improvised markets or clamoring 
beggars along the way — none of the familiar things of Haiti were in 
evidence, except the fighting cocks. Such horsemen as we passed 
rode in well upholstered saddles, doubly softened by the Spanish-Ameri- 
can pellon, or shaggy saddle rug. The 'women accompanying them 
clung uncomfortably to clumsy side-saddles, and were dressed in far 
more style than their Haitian prototypes, pink gowns being most in 
favor, and in place of the loose slippers the majority wore shoes 
elaborate enough to satisfy a New York shop-girl. Cemeteries at the 
edge of each town were forests of wooden crosses, contrasting with the 
coffin-shaped cement tombs of Haiti. 

Guayovin,«a town of considerable size and noted for its revolutionary 
history, the scattered hamlet of Laguna Salada, the larger village of 
Esperanza, one pueblo after another was the same blurred vista of 
wide, sandy streets, of open shop fronts and gaping inhabitants. We 
soon detected a surly attitude toward Americans, a sullen, passive 
resentment that recalled the attitude of Colombia as I had known it 
eight years before. There was more superficial courtesy than in our 
own brusk and hurried land; the Dominican, like all our neighbors to 
the southward, cultivates an exterior polish. But with the exception 
of a few who went out of their way to demonstrate their pro-American 
sentiments, to express themselves as far more pleased with foreign 
occupation than with the continual threat of revolution, the attitude 
of silent protest was everywhere in the air. 

At the end of fifty kilometers, in which we had forded only one 
pathetic little stream, the landscape changed somewhat for the better, 
though at the same time the u road " became even more atrocious. 
Hitherto the only beauty in the scene had been a pretty little flowering 



i 9 8 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

cactus bush, like an inverted candelabra, and the soft velvety colors of 
the barren brown vistas. Now the thorny vegetation, the chaparral, 
and the cactus gave way to clumps of bamboo, to towering palms, and 
other trees of full stature, while corn and beans began to clothe the still 
deadly-dry soil. High hills had arisen close on the left, higher ones 
farther off to the right; then ahead appeared beautiful labyrinths of 
deep-blue mountains, range after range piled up one behind the other 
in amphitheatrical formation, culminating in the cloud-coiffed peak of 
Tino, some ten thousand feet above the sea and the highest point in 
the West Indies. 

Navarrete, strung along the beginning of an excellent highway that 
was to continue, except for two unfinished bridges, to Santiago, boasted 
real houses, some of palm trunks, most of them of genuine lumber with 
more corrugated iron than thatched roofs, some of their walls of faded 
pink, green, or yellow, many of them frankly unpainted. A consider- 
able commercial activity occupied its inhabitants. Beyond, the country 
grew still greener, with groves of royal palms waving their ostrich 
plumes with the dignified leisureliness of the tropics, and the highway 
began to undulate, or, as it seemed to us behind our over-eager chauf- 
feur, to pitch and roll, over low foot-hills. We picked up a rusty 
little railroad on the left, farther on a power line and a dozen tele- 
graph wires striding over hill and dale, raced at illegal speed through 
Villa Gonzalez, and entered a still more verdant region of vegetable 
gardens in fertile black soil. Then all at once we topped a rise from 
which spread out all the splendid green valley of Yaque, Santiago de 
los Caballeros piled up a sloping high ground a couple of miles away, 
with mountains that had grown to imposing height still far distant to the 
right. A truck-load of marines, monopolizing the right of way in 
the innocently obstructive manner we had often seen in France, blocked 
our progress for a time ; then we swung past the inevitable shaded 
plaza of all Spanish-American towns, and drew up with a snort at the 
Santiago post office just as the cathedral clock was striking the hour 
of three. 

Before we had time even to set foot in Santiago we were greeted by 
my old friend " Lieutenant Long " of Canal Zone police fame, who had 
already put the town in a proper mood for our reception. Since the 
days when we had pursued felons together along the ten-mile strip of 
Panamanian jungle the erstwhile lieutenant, now more fittingly known 
as " Big George," had added steadily to his laurels as a good and true 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 199 

servant of mankind. From the defelonized banks of the canal to the 
command of the sleuths of Porto Rico had been a natural step, and 
when he had detected everything worth detecting in our West Indian 
isle, and fathered a company of the 17th Infantry during the late inter- 
national misunderstanding, " Big George " accepted the Augean task of 
initiating the Dominicans into the mysteries of their new American- 
sired land tax. 

Considerably more than four hundred years ago, when the redskin 
north of the Rio Grande had yet to scalp his initial pale face, there 
was founded in the fertile valley of the Yaque the first of the many 
Santiagos that to-day dot the map of more than half the western 
hemisphere. Thirty Spanish gentlemen, as the word was understood 
in those roistering days, hidalgos who had followed on the heels of 
Columbus, were the original settlers, and because of their noble birth 
they were permitted by royal decree to call their new home by the name 
it still officially bears, — Santiago de los Caballeros. Although the 
present inhabitants of the aristocratic old town by no means all boast 
themselves " gentlemen " either in the conquistador or the modern 
sense of the term, some of the leading families can trace their ancestry 
in unbroken line from those old Spanish hidalgos. Many of these de- 
scendants of fifteenth century grandees still retain the armor, swords, 
and other quaint warlike gear of their ancestors. A few have even 
kept their Caucasian blood pure through all the generations and fre- 
quent disasters of that long four hundred years, but the vast majority 
of them give greater or less evidence of African graftings on the family 
tree. The Cibao, as the northern half of Santo Domingo is called, 
is the region in which the Spaniards first found in any quantity the 
gold they came a-seeking, and gentlemanly Santiago has ever been its 
principal city. Twice destroyed by earthquakes, like so many cities 
of the West Indies, sacked by pirates and invaders more times than it 
cares to remember, it has persisted through all its mishaps. 

But in spite of its flying start Santiago has by no means kept pace 
with many a parvenu in the New World. Barely can it muster twenty 
thousand inhabitants, and in progress and industry it has drifted but 
slowly down the stream of time. Revolutions have been its chief set- 
back, for the innumerable civil wars that have decimated the population 
of the republic ever since it asserted its freedom from the Spanish 
crown have almost invariably centered about the city of caballeros. A 
hundred Spanish-American towns can duplicate its every feature. 
About the invariable central plaza, with its shaded benches, diagonal 



200 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

walks, and evening promenaders, stand the bulking, weather-peeled 
cathedral with its constantly thumping, tin-voiced bells, the casa con- 
sistorial where the municipal council dawdles through its weekly meet- 
ings, the wide open yet exclusive clubs, and the residences of the most 
ancient families, their lower stories occupied by shops and cafes. In 
contrast to this proudly kept square the wide, right-angled streets that 
radiate from it are either congenitally innocent of paving or littered 
with the remnants of what may long ago have been cobbled driveways. 
As in all Spanish-America the lack of civic team-work is shown in the 
sidewalks ; which are high, low, ludicrously narrow, or lacking entirely, 
according to the personal whim of each householder, and rather family 
porches than public rights of way. Its houses, mostly of one story, 
never higher than two, are something more than half of wood, the 
remainder being adobe or baked-mud structures that some time in the 
remote past had their facades daubed with whitewash or scantily painted 
in various bright colors. The cathedral, the municipal building, many 
a private residence, our very hotel room were speckled with bullet-holes 
more or less diligently patched, corroborating the verbal evidence of 
Santiago's revolutionary activities. There is a faint reminder of the 
Moors in the tendency for each trade to monopolize one street to the 
exclusion of the others. A dozen barbershops may be found in a single 
block, cafes cluster together, drygoods shops with their languid male 
clerks shoulder one another with a certain degree of leisurely, un- 
individualistic aggressiveness. Farther out, the unkempt streets 
dwindle away between lop-shouldered little huts that seem to need the 
supporting mutual assistance shared by their neighbors nearer the center 
of town. 

There is not a street car in all the island of Santo Domingo, or Haiti, 
as you choose to call it. Dingy, wretched old carriages, their horses 
only a trifle less gaunt and ungroomed than those of Port au Prince, 
loiter about a corner of the plaza, behind the cathedral, shrieking their 
pleas at every possible fare who passes within their field of vision. 
Automobiles are not unknown, but they have not yet invaded Santiago 
in force. The inevitable venders of lottery tickets, which in Santo 
Domingo are of municipal rather than national issue and resemble the 
hand-bills of some itinerant family of barn-stormers, pester the passer- 
by every few yards with spurious promises of sudden fortune. In the 
cathedral the visitor finds himself face to face at every step with ad- 
monitions that women must have their heads covered and that worship- 
ers shall not spit on the floor. The first command is universally recog- 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 201 

nized, if only by the spreading of a handkerchief over the frizzled 
tresses, but the latter is by no means so faithfully obeyed. If there is 
anything whatever individualistic about St. James of the Gentlemen 
that distinguishes it from its countless cousins below the Rio Grande, 
it is the stars and stripes that wave above the ancient fortress overlook- 
ing the placid River Yaque, and the groups of American marines who 
come now and then striding down its untended streets. 

The average santiagueno reaches the dignity of clothes somewhat 
late in life. Naked black or brown babies adorn every block, the sight 
of a plump boy of five taking his constitutional dressed in a pair of 
sandals, a bright red hat, and a magnificent expression of unconcern 
attracts the attention of no one except strangers. Girls show the 
prudery of their sex somewhat earlier in life, but many a boy learns 
to smoke cigarettes, and even long black cigars, before he submits to 
the inconvenience of his first garment. It may be this sartorial freedom 
of his earlier life that makes the Santiago male prone to sport a costume 
that belies his years. Youths of sixteen, eighteen, and some one 
might easily suspect of being twenty, display an expanse of brown legs 
between their tight knee-breeches and short socks that makes their 
precocious tendency to frequent cafes, consume fiery drinks and man- 
size cigars, and enamorar las muchachas doubly striking. They are 
intelligent youths, on the whole, compared with their Haitian neigh- 
bors, with a quick wit to catch a political argument or the mysteries of 
a mechanical contrivance, though they have the tendency of all their 
mixed race to slow down in their mental processes soon after reaching 
what with us would be early manhood. La juventud of Santo Domingo 
is beginning to look with slightly less scorn upon the use of the hands 
as a means of livelihood, an improvement which may be largely credited 
to American occupation, not so much through precept and example as 
by the reduction in political sinecures and the institution of genuine 
examinations for candidates to government office. 

In character, as in physical aspect, Santiago is true to type. The 
outward forms of politeness are diligently cultivated; actual, physical 
consideration for the comfort or convenience of others is conspicuous 
by its scarcity. The same man who raises his hat to and shakes hands 
with his neighbor ten times a day shows no hesitancy in maintaining 
any species of nuisance, from a bevy of fighting cocks to a braying 
jackass, against the peace and happiness of that same neighbor, nor in 
hugging a house-wall when it is his place to take to the gutter. A 
haughtiness of demeanor, an over-developed personal pride that it 



202 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

would be difficult to find real reason for, burden all except the most 
poverty-stricken class. Amid the medley of tints that make up the 
population the casual observer might conclude that the existence of a 
color-line would be out of the question in Santiago. As he dips beneath 
the surface, however, he finds a very decided one, nay, several, dividing 
the population not into two, but into three or four social strata, though 
the lines of demarkation are neither as distinct nor as adamant as with 
us. Thus one of the tile-floored clubs on the central plaza, the chair- 
forested parlor of which stands ostensibly wide open, admits no member 
whose ancestry has not been unbrokenly Caucasian, while another 
across the square welcomes neither pure whites nor full-blooded Afri- 
cans. An amusing feature of this club exclusiveness is that the first 
society, after what is said to have been violent debate, declined to admit 
American members, as a protest against " the unwarranted interference 
by superior force in our national affairs." In retaliation, or rather, in 
supreme indifference to this attitude, the forces of occupation have 
acquired the premises next door and take no back seat to the Dominicans 
in the matter of exclusiveness. It may be the merest coincidence that 
whenever a dance is given in the American clubrooms a still more blatant 
orchestra, seated close up against the thin partition between the two 
social rendezvous, furnishes the inspiration for a similar recreation. 

The principal business of Santiago, if one may judge by the frequent 
warehouse doors from which issues the acrid smell of sweating tobacco, 
is the buying and selling of the narcotic weed. It comes in great bales, 
wrapped in yagna, or the thick, leathern leaf-stem of the royal palm, 
of which each tree sheds one a month and which is turned to such a 
variety of uses throughout the West Indies. Women and boys are 
constantly picking these bales apart and strewing their contents about 
in various heaps, to just what purpose is not apparent to the layman, 
for they always end by bundling them up again in the self-same yagna, 
in which dusky draymen carry them off once more to parts unknown. 
A considerable amount of the stuff is consumed locally, however, for 
Santiago boasts one large cigar factory and a number of small ones, 
ranging down to one-room hovels in which the daily output could prob- 
ably be contained within two boxes — were it not the custom in Santo 
Domingo simply to tie them in bundles. 

The smoker must conduct himself with circumspection in American- 
governed Santo Domingo. Each and every cigar is wrapped round 
not only with the usual banded trademark, but also with a revenue 
stamp. Now beware that you do not indulge that all but universal 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 203 

American habit of removing the band before lighting the cigar. In 
Santo Domingo it is unlawful to withdraw this proof of legal origin 
until the weed has been " partially consumed," and the official expert 
ruling on that phrase is that the clipping off of the consumer's end does 
not constitute even partial consumption, which only the burning of a 
certain portion of the, customarily, opposite extremity, accomplishes. 
Furthermore, when at last you do venture to remove the decoration, do 
not on any account fail to mutilate it beyond all semblance to its original 
state. If you are detected in the perpetration of either of the unlawful 
acts above specified, no power can save you from falling into the hands 
of " Mac," who sits in the same office with " Big George " — whenever 
one or both of them are not pursuing similar malefactors in another 
corner of the Cibao — facing the charge of unlawfully, wilfully, and 
maliciously violating Article 12 of the Internal Revenue Law of the 
sovereign Republica Dominicana, and there is no more certain road to 
the prisoner's dock. 

But I am getting ahead of my story. " Mac " will make his official 
entry all in due season. What I started to explain was why one may 
frequently behold an elephantine Dominican market woman, often with 
a brood of piccanninies half concealed in the folds of her ample skirt, 
parading down the street with the air of a New York clubman in 
spite of the bushel or two of yams or plaintains on her head, puffing 
haughtily at a cigar the band of which falsely suggests that she has 
recently squandered a dollar bill with her tobacconist. Indeed, many 
an over-cautious Dominican avoids all possibility of falling into the 
net by smoking serenely on through band, stamp, and all, which, to tell 
the truth, does not particularly depreciate the aroma of the average 
native cigar. 

There is sound basis for Article 12. In the good old days when 
there were no battalions of marines to interfere with the national 
sport of Santo Domingo the stamp tax was already in force, and the 
consumption of cigars was almost what it is to-day ; yet for some 
occult reason it scarcely produced a tenth of its present revenue. First 
of all there were the " chivo " cigars, — chivo meaning not merely goat 
but something corresponding to our word " graft " in the Spanish West 
Indies — which never made any pretense of bearing a stamp. Some 
of them were made secretly ; a veritable pillar of the social structure 
of Santo Domingo was discovered to be operating a clandestine cigar- 
factory long after the Americans took up this particular bit of the 
white man's burden. Others were privately placed on the market by 



204 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

legitimate manufacturers, who supplied a certain percentage of legal 
stock also. A third scheme was to fill the pockets of the native in- 
spector with a choice brand and advise him to forget the matter; still 
another alternative was to buy the stamps at a bargain from some 
revenue official who was hard pressed for ready cash. But the favorite 
means of avoiding contributions to the wily politicians in the capital 
was simplicity itself. A cigar-maker purchased a hundred revenue 
stamps and wrapped them about his first hundred cigars. His retailer, 
who might be himself, his wife, his cousin, or at least his compadre, 
greeted the purchaser with a smiling countenance. " Cigars ? Why 
certainly. Try these. Como va la senora hoy? Y los ninosf 
Curious exhibition that fourth pair of cocks gave on Sunday, verdad?" 
Bargains are not struck hastily in Santo Domingo. By the time the 
transaction was completed the retailer had ample opportunity idly to 
slip the bands off the cigars and drop them into his counter drawer. 
The purchaser made no protest, even if he noticed the manipulation, 
for he was buying cigars, not revenue stamps. It is vouched for that 
the same band saw continual service in the old days for a year or two. 
But it is a careless smoker to-day who ventures to thrust a cigar into 
his pocket without making sure that its proof of legality is intact. 

" Big George " arranged that we should spend the first Sunday after 
our arrival in the most typical Dominican style of celebration, — the par- 
taking of lechon asado. His choice of scene for the celebration, too, was 
particularly happy. An hour's easy jog from town — easy because the 
saddle-horses of Santo Domingo, like those of Cuba, are all " gaited," 
that is, gifted with a singlefoot pace that makes them as comfortable 
seats as any rocking-chair — brought us to the estate of Jaragua, the 
exact site of the first founding of Santiago by the Castilian hidalgos. It 
was the first earthquake that caused them to transfer it from this heart of 
the valley to the bluff overlooking the Yaque. The ruins of an old brick- 
and-stone church, of a water reservoir or community bath, and long 
lines of stones embedded in the ground marking the remnants of 
cobbled streets and house walls, are half covered with the brush and 
jungle-grass of a modern hog farm. Magnificent royal palms rise 
from what were once private family nooks ; immense tropical trees 
spread over former parlors more charming roofs than their original 
coverings of thatch; the pigs frequently root up ancient coins that may 
long ago have jingled in Columbus' own pocket. 

Under the dense, capacious shade of a fatherly old mango-tree sat a 



THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES 205 

negro peon, slowly turning round and round over a fire of specially 
chosen, aromatic fagots a suckling pig, or Icchon, spitted on a long 
bamboo pole. In the outdoor kitchen of the rambling, one-story, tile- 
roofed, delightful old Spanish country house a group of ebony servants 
of both sexes and all ages were preparing a dozen other native dishes 
the mere aroma of which made a hungry man withdraw to leeward and 
await the summons with what patience he could muster. Our host and 
his family, with just enough African tinge to their ancestry to make 
their hair curl, hurried hither and yon, striving to minister to our 
already perfect comfort. There is no, more genuine hospitality than 
that of the higher class haccndados of rural Latin-America, once they 
have cast aside the mixture of shyness and rather oppressive dignity in 
which they commonly wrap themselves before strangers. 

In due leisurely season the chief victim of the day's feast, his ma- 
hogany skin crackling from the recent ordeal, bathed in his own tender 
juices, was slid down the bamboo pole to a giant platter and given the 
place of honor on the family board. Flanked on all sides by the results 
of the kitchen industry, — heaping plates of steamed yuca, mashed 
yams bristling with native peppers, boiled calabash, plump boniatos, 
golden Spanish chick-peas, even a Brobdingnagian beefsteak — and 
these in turn by the now thoroughly congenial hosts and guests, a bare- 
foot, wide-eyed servant behind every other chair, the celebration began. 
Spanish wines which one would never have credited with finding their 
way to this far-off corner of the New World turned the big bucolic 
tumblers, red and golden in perhaps too rapid succession. Dominican 
tales of the olden times, American pleasantries reclothed in rattling 
Castilian, reminiscences of Haitian occupation from the still bright-eyed 
grandmother, all rose in a babel of hilarity that floated away through 
the immense open doorways on the delightful trade winds that sweep 
constantly over the West Indies. But alas for the brevity of human 
appetite ! Long before the center of attraction had lost his resemblance 
to the eager little rooter of the day before, while the Gargantuan beef- 
steak still sat intact, eyeing the circle with a neglected air, one after 
another of the sated convivialists was beckoning away with a scornful 
gesture of disinterest the candied and spiced papaya which the servants 
were bent on setting before him. What, too, shall I say of the das- 
tardly conduct of " Big George? " For with his help the lechon, nay, 
even the neglected beefsteak, might have been reduced to more seemly 
proportions before they were abandoned to the eager fingers of the 
gleaming-toothed denizens of the kitchen. The painful truth is that 



206 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the defelonizer of Porto Rico, the erstwhile dread of Canal Zone crim- 
inals, the man who had so often given a " summary " to a hapless mem- 
ber of the 17th Infantry for being a moment late at reveille, was absent 
without leave. Even " Mac," with his whole family of little Mackites, 
their chubby faces giving a touch of old Erin to this Dominican land- 
scape, had arrived on the scene at the crucial moment. What excuse, 
then, can one fabricate for an unhampered bachelor whose seven- 
league legs might have covered the paltry distance between new and 
old Santiago in a twinkling, yet who had chosen to desert his bidden 
guests in the heart of a bandit-infested island? Can even poetic license 
pardon a man, particularly a man who dents the lintels of half the doors 
he passes through, who remains at home to write sonnets when he 
might be partaking of lechon asadof Certainly the admission of such 
irrelevant testimony as the fact that the horse furnished him by an 
unobserving Dominican was not capable of lifting clear of the ground 
the seven-league legs already stigmatized cannot rank even as extenu- 
ating circumstances. 



CHAPTER IX 

TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 

THERE are two railroads in Santo Domingo, confined to the 
Cibao, or northern half of the Republic, which by their united 
efforts connect Santiago with the sea in both directions. The 
more diminutive of them is the Ferrocarril Central Dominicano, cov- 
ering the hundred kilometers between Moca and Puerto Plata, on the 
north coast, with the ancient city of the Gentlemen about two thirds 
of the way inland. It is government owned, but takes its orders from 
an American manager. It burns soft coal, as the traveler will soon 
discover to his regret, and, unlike most lines south of the Rio Grande, 
it has only one class. The result is that the single little passenger train 
which makes the round trip three times a week and keeps the Sabbath 
contains a motley throng of voyagers. I say " contains " with hesita- 
tion, for that is somewhat straining the truth. The bare statement that 
its gauge is six inches short of a yard should be sufficient hint to the 
imaginative reader to indicate the disparity between travelers and cars. 
In fact, any but the shortest knees are prone to become hopelessly 
entangled with those of one's companion or in the rattan seat-back 
ahead, and the fully developed man who would view the passing land- 
scape must needs force his head down somewhere near the pit of his 
stomach. The train has its virtues, however, for all that. The more 
than indefinite periods it tarries at each succeeding station give the 
seeker after local color ample opportunity to make the thorough 
acquaintance of every town and its inhabitants, particularly as it is the 
custom of the latter to gather en masse along the platforms. 

We made up a party of four for the journey. " Big George," his 
sonnets safely despatched to his clamoring publisher, was sadly needed 
to stifle a feud between his two native subordinates in the northern port ; 
the rumor of an illicit still in the same locality had been enough to send 
" Mac " racing to the station. We wormed our way into one of the 
two passenger coaches with mixed feelings. For Rachel it was com- 
modious enough. After years of experience with the cramped and 
weak-jointed furniture of Latin-America I should naturally not be so 

207 



208 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

lacking in foresight as to choose — or be chosen by — a wife who 
required an undue amount of space. " Mac " and I, too, had been 
booted about this celestial footstool long enough to accept a certain de- 
gree of packing without protest. But if " Big George " stuck doggedly 
to the platform and gazed pensively along the roofs of the cars ahead to 
where the wool-pated fireman and engineer were struggling to contain 
themselves within the same cab, it was not for the sole purpose of 
gathering inspiration for new sonnets from the fronds of the passing 
palm trees. 

However, I was near forgetting to bring " Mac " in for his formal 
introduction, and there is no better time to redeem my promise than 
while we are tearing along at eight miles an hour over a region we 
have already viewed by Ford. Top sergeant of a troop of American 
cavalry that won laurels in the Spanish-American war, he had chosen 
to remain behind in Porto Rico when his " hitch " was ended. There 
he helped to set our new possession to rights and took unto himself 
the foundation of a family. With the establishment of American 
control of customs in Santo Domingo in 1907 he was the first of our 
fellow-countrymen to accept the dangerous task of patrolling the 
Haitian-Dominican frontier. Many a party of smugglers did he rout 
single-handed; times without number he was surrounded by bandits, 
or threatened with such fate as only the outlaws of savage Haiti and 
their Dominican confederates can inflict upon helpless white men falling 
into their hands. " Mac " made it his business never to be helpless. 
His trusty rifle lost none of the accuracy it had learned on the target- 
range; the tactics of self-preservation and the will to command he had 
gained in his long military schooling stood him in increasing good 
stead. Even when he was shot from ambush and marked for life 
with two great spreading scars beneath his shirt, he did not lose his 
soldierly poise, but wreaked a memorable vengeance on his foes before 
he dragged himself back to safety. " Mac " does not boast of these 
things ; indeed, he rarely speaks of them, except as a background of 
his witty stories of border control in the old days. But his colleagues 
of those merry by-gone times still tell of his fearless exploits. 

Beyond Navarrete, where the railroad begins to part company with 
the highway from the west, the train took to climbing in great leisurely 
curves higher and higher into the northern range of hills. Royal palms 
stood like markers for steep vistas of denser, but less lofty, vegetation ; 
scattered houses of simple tropical construction squatting here and there 
on little cleared spaces — cleared even of grass, which the Spanish- 



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The church within a church of Maca 




The "holy place" of Santo Domingo on top of the Santo Cerro where Columbus planted 

a cross 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 209 

American seems ever to abhor — broke the otherwise green and full- 
wooded landscape. Worn out rails did duty as telegraph poles; the 
power line that brings Santiago its electric light from Puerto Plata 
smiled at our pigmy efforts to keep up with it. Higher still the railway 
banks were lined with the miserable yagua and jungle-rubbish shacks of 
Haitian squatters. An editorial in the least pathetic of Santiago's daily 
handbills masquerading under the name of newspapers had protested 
the very day before against this " constant influx of undesirable immi- 
gration." Indeed, the American governor had recently been prevailed 
upon to issue a decree tending to curtail the increase in this sort of 
population. 

Under this new decree all natives of other West Indian islands resi- 
dent within the Dominican Republic must register within four months 
and be prepared to leave if their presence is deemed undesirable; those 
who seek admission in the future must have in their possession at 
least fifty dollars. " Santo Domingo for the Dominicans " is the 
slogan of those who have gained the governor's ear. If they are to have 
immigration, let it be Caucasian, preferably from Latin Europe. This 
demand sounds well enough in print, but is sadly out of gear with the 
facts. The Dominican Republic covers two-thirds of the ancient is- 
land of Quisqueya, which has an area equal to that of Maine or Ire- 
land. Its more than 28,000 square miles, four times the size of Con- 
necticut and richer in undeveloped resources than any other region of 
the West Indies, is inhabited by a population scarcely equal to that of 
Buffalo. Nearly two-thirds of those inhabitants are of the weaker 
sex; moreover a large percentage of the males are too proud or too 
habitually fatigued to indulge in manual labor, which is the most cry- 
ing need of the country. Caucasian settlers would cause it to con- 
tribute its fair share to the world's bread-basket, were there any known 
means of attracting them. But as there seems to be none, its virgin 
fields must await the importation of labor from its overcrowded island 
neighbors, particularly from that land of half its size and three times 
its population which is separated from it only by a knee-deep frontier. 
Yet what Haitian laborer boasts a fortune of fifty dollars? A black 
plutocrat of that grade would remain at home to end his days in ease 
in his jungle palace or finance a revolution. The Dominican is not 
unjustified in wishing to keep his land free from the semi-savage hordes 
beyond the Massacre, but a hungry world will not long endure the 
sight of one of its richest garden spots lying virtually fallow. 

Beyond a tunnel at the summit of the line, 1600 feet above the sea, 



210 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the passengers poured pellmell into a station restaurant. Its long 
general table was sagging under a half-dozen styles of meat and all 
the known native vegetables and fruits. But woe betide the traveler 
who clung to the dignity of good breeding ! For he would infallibly be 
found clamoring in vain for something with which to decorate his sec- 
ond plate when the warning screech of the toy locomotive announced 
that it was prepared to undertake new feats. 

The Atlantic slope of the little mountain range was more unbrokenly 
green than the interior valley behind, for it has first choice of the 
rains that sweep in from the northeast. Coffee, corn, shaded patches 
of cacao, and the giant leaves of the banana clothed the steep hillsides. 
Cattle grazed here and there beneath the dense foliage. About the 
Perez sugar-mill horn-yoked oxen butted along the bottomless roads 
massive two-wheeled carts piled high with cane. Several of the wiser 
passengers, a woman or two among them, had sought more commodious 
quarters in the " baggage car " ahead, an open box car in which one 
might pick a steamer chair or some little less comfortable seat from the 
luggage piled helterskelter against the two end walls. " Big George " 
invaded the roof above, where some of us felt impelled to follow, lest 
his sonnetical abstraction cause him to be left hanging from the tele- 
graph wire that sagged low across the line at frequent intervals. This 
free-and-easy, take-care-of-yourself-because-we-don't-intend-to manner 
of operating public utilities is one of the chief charms of the American 
tropics. 

At La Sabana, with its majestic ceiba tree framing the jumping-ofr" 
place ahead, we halted to change engines. The ten per cent, grade 
down to the coast had led to the recent introduction of powerful Shea 
locomotives to take the place of the former rack-rails that lay in 
tumbled heaps along the edge of the constantly encroaching vegetation. 
Wrecks of cars, like helpless upturned turtles, rusting away beneath 
their growing shrouds of greenery below the embankment of several 
sharp curves, suggested why the change had been made. Trees and 
bushes completely covered with ivy-like growths as with green clothing 
hung out in the blazing sunshine to dry lined the way. The wide- 
spread view of the foam-edged coast of the blue Atlantic, with the red 
roofs of Puerto Plata peering through the trees, shrank and faded away 
as we reached the narrow plain, across which we jolted for ten minutes 
more through sugar, mango, and banana-bearing fields before the 
passengers disentangled themselves on the edge of the sea. 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 211 

The port was somewhat larger, more sanitary and more enterprising 
than we had expected. Cacao, sugar, and tobacco were being run on 
mule-drawn hand-cars out to a waiting steamer, though, strictly speak- 
ing, the open roadstead can scarcely be called a harbor. The town was 
pretty, shaded in its outer portions by cocoanut and other seaside 
tropical trees, and with all the usual Spanish-American features. A 
church completely covered with sheet iron walled one side of the de- 
lightful little plaza, about which were the customary open clubs, one 
of them occupied by American marines, whose rag-time phonographs 
and similar pastimes ladened the evening breezes more than all the 
others. The cemetery on the edge of the sloping hills was agreeably 
decorated with bushes of velvety, dark red leaves, but I remember it 
rather because of the name of a marine sergeant on the bulkhead of 
one of those curious Spanish rows of bureau-drawer graves set into 
the massive outer wall. Strange final resting-place of an American 
boy! Nor was he of this new generation of " leather-necks" that has 
settled down to make Santo Domingo behave itself; he had been left 
there early in the century, probably from some passing ship. The 
familiar time-battered carriages with their jangling bells rumbled 
languidly through the streets ; a match factory that lights all the cigars 
of the revolutionary republic jostled for space among the dwellings; 
swarms of mosquitoes drove us to take early refuge within our bed- 
shielding mosquiteros; American bugle calls broke now and then on the 
soft night air, and a large generous bullet-hole gave the final national 
touch to our weak-showered, tubless hotel bathroom. 

Our longer trip eastward from Santiago happily coincided with the 
monthly inspection tours of their district by " Mac " and " Big George." 
The run to Moca through a rich, floor-flat valley spreading far away 
to the southward gave new evidence of the fertility of Santo Domingo. 
Bananas and cacao, maize and yuca in the same fields, now and then a 
coffee plantation, constituted the chief cultivation. Tobacco was be- 
ing transplanted here and there. Frequent villages were hidden away 
in the greenery ; nowhere was there any evidence of such abject poverty 
as that of Haiti. A section of the new national highway which, under 
American incentive, is destined some day to connect Monte Cristi with 
the far-off capital, followed the railway, but its black loam surface, 
hardened into enormous cracks and ruts since the end of the last rainy 
season, made it too venturesome a risk even for the courageous Ford. 



212 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

A long viaduct lifted the train across what Spanish-Americans call a 
river, and a moment later we had come to the end of the government 
railroad. 

Moca, famous for its coffee, which is so often taken to be of Arabic 
origin, is rated a " white town," because of a slightly increased per- 
centage of pure, or nearly pure, descendants of Castilians. Thanks to 
the coffee-clad foot-hills to the north and the broad, fertile plain to 
the south and east, it is wealthy above the average, and rumor has it 
that much gold might be dug up from its back gardens and patios. 
There is special reason for this, for like its neighbor, Salcedo, it has 
ever been a center of revolutionists, bandits, and political intrigues. 
Two presidents have been assassinated in its streets; its hatred of 
Americans is as deadly as it dares to be under a firm marine com- 
mander. An excellent, cement-paved, up-to-date market contrasts with 
the dusty open spaces, with their squatting, ragged negresses, in Haiti. 
What was designed to be an imposing stone church, however, has never 
reached anything like completion. Not long ago the resident padre 
had the happy thought of instituting a lottery to swell the contributions 
from his tardy parishioners, and two glaringly new square cement 
towers are the result of the inspiration. But time moves more swiftly 
than the best devised schemes ; as the towers rise, the already aged 
stone walls go crumbling away, and the real place of worship consists 
merely of a ragged thatched roof on stilts covering only a fraction 
of the half-walled inclosure. 

The Ferrocarril de Samana y Santiago, neither of which towns it 
actually reaches, connects at Moca with the government line and runs 
to the port of Sanchez on the east coast, with short branches to La 
Vega and San Francisco de Macoris. It is popularly known as the 
" Scotch line," is some thirty years old and still equipped with the 
original rolling stock, but has a meter gauge, more commodious and bet- 
ter ventilated cars, a more easily riding roadbed, a daily service in 
both directions except on Sunday, and makes slightly better speed than 
its rival. The short run to La Vega, with a change of cars at Las 
Cabullas, is along the same rich valley. Founded by Columbus him- 
self in a slightly different locality, this center of a splendidly fertile 
cacao and agricultural district is a near replica of Moca, all but sur- 
rounded by the river Camu. Rich black mud, as is fitting in a region 
producing the chocolate-yielding pods, slackens the footsteps of visitor 
and resident alike in all but the few blocks bordering on the plaza 
though all its streets were once paved with stone by a Haitian governor. 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 213 

" Mac " found interest in its distilleries, shops, and revenue office ; 
" Big George " made use of those seven-league legs to set the property- 
valuation of the town in one short day, but our own curiosity centered 
about the " Holy Hill " and the ruins of the original settlement. To 
tell the truth the latter does not give the traveler's imagination much 
to build upon. A few miles from the modern town, along a stone- 
surfaced section of that national highway-to-be, are the remnants of 
a few stone walls, a low ancient fortress or two, and slabs of good 
old Spanish mortar that has outlived the flat, pale-red bricks it once 
held together, all hidden away in the hot and humid wilderness of 
a badly tended cacao plantation. 

The great place of pilgrimage of the region, indeed, the most vene- 
rated spot in all Santo Domingo, is the Santo Cerro, a plump hill sur- 
mounted by a massive stone church, a mile or so nearer the town. 
Now and again some faithful believer still comes from a distant corner 
of the republic and climbs the long stony slope on his knees, though 
such medieval piety has all but died out even in Santo Domingo. The 
church at the summit is in the special keeping of Nuestra Senora de 
las Mercedes, whose miraculous cures are reputed to have no superior 
anywhere in the Catholic world. A town of superstitious invalids 
clusters about the entrance to the inclosure in wretched thatched huts ; 
on certain days of the year the sacred hilltop is crowded with the more 
modern type of pilgrim, who not infrequently comes by carriage or 
motor. 

The story runs — and up to a certain point at least it is historically 
accurate — that Columbus and his men had camped on the hill, when 
they beheld swarming up from the vega below a great horde of Indians, 
bent on their immediate destruction. The discoverer was equal to the 
occasion. Ordering his men to cut a branch from an immense nispero 
tree beneath which he had been resting, he fashioned it into a crude 
cross, and planted it before the advancing enemy. " Then," as the 
cautious old Italian padre who to-day replaces his illustrious fellow- 
countryman put it, " I was not present, so I cannot vouch for it, but 
they say " — that the Virgin of Las Mercedes appeared in the sky above 
and saved the day for the conquistadores. At any rate the Indians 
were repulsed, and the Spaniards at once set about building La Vega, 
old La Vega, that is, at the foot of the hill. 

The church of pilgrimage is modern, marking the site of the an- 
cient one that was erected over the improvised cross. It, too, is liber- 
ally marked with patched bullet-holes, for Dominican revolutionists 



214 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

have no compunction in using even a sacro-sacred edifice as a bar- 
ricade. Inside, in addition to the richly garbed doll over the altar 
and the usual gaudy bric-a-brac of such places, there is a square hole 
in the marble pavement of the principal chapel, filled with yellowish 
soil. This purports to be the exact spot on which Columbus erected 
the cross, and the healing properties of the earth within it depend only 
on the faith of the seeker after health — and certain other indispensable 
little formalities which are inseparable from all supernatural cures. 
Pious Dominicans step into the santo hoyo barefooted, muttering 
promesas, or promises of reward to the attendant Virgin if their health 
is restored, and even those who decline to uncover their pedal infirmi- 
ties in so public a place carry off" a pinch or a handful of the sacred 
earth. Yet the " holy hole " is not the deep well one would fancy four 
centuries of such excavation must have left it. If anything it is slightly 
above the level of the ground outside the church. For no matter how 
much of the yellow soil is carried off during the day, morning always 
finds the hole filled again by some " miracle " — which somehow brings 
up visions of a poor old native peon wandering about in the darkest 
hours of the night with a sack and a shovel. 

The original nispcro stood for more than four hundred years in the 
identical spot where Columbus found it. Not until the month of May 
before our visit did it at length fall down — " por descuido; for lack 
of care," as the present padre put it, sadly. But the pious old Italian 
has planted in its place a "son" of the historical tree, — a twig that 
already shows a will to fill the footsteps of its " father " — and from 
the wood of the latter he has made a boxful of little crosses which he 
gives away " to true believers as sacred relics ; to others as souvenirs " 
— though there is nothing to hinder the recipient of either class from 
dropping into the padre's bloodless hand a little remembrance " for my 
poor." 

Even though Columbus had never climbed it nor " miracles " been 
performed upon it, the holy hilltop would be a place worth coming far 
to see, or at least to look from. The wonderful floor-flat Vega Real, 
the most splendid plain in Santo Domingo, if not in the West Indies, 
is spread out below it in all its entirety. Dense green, palm-dotted 
above its sea of vegetation, even its cultivated places patches of un- 
broken greenery, with Moca, Salcedo, far-off " Macoris," and half a 
dozen other towns plainly visible, a sparkling river gleaming here and 
there, walled in the vast distance by ranges that rise to pine-clad 
heights, there are few more extensive, verdant, or entrancing sights in 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 215 

the world than this still more than half virgin vale. Compared with it 
in any respect the far-famed valley of Yumurii in Cuba is of slight im- 
portance. 

Several hours' ride across this world's garden of the future, with a 
change to, and later from, the main line, brought us at nightfall to 
San Francisco de Macoris. Unlike nearly every other town of Santo 
Domingo, this one is of modern origin, a mere stripling of less than 
a century of existence. It lies where the Vega Real begins to slope 
upward toward the northern range, with extensive cacao estates of 
rather indolent habits hidden away among the foot-hills behind it. 
A flat town of tin roofs, its outskirts concealed beneath tropical trees, 
it offers nothing of special interest to the mere traveler. 

A nine-day fiesta in honor of Nuestra Senora de la Altagracia, which 
had broken out with an uproarious beating of discordant church bells, 
tinny drums, and home-made fireworks during our day in La Vega 
raged throughout all our stay in " Macoris." All the population capable 
of setting one foot before the other joined in the religious processions 
that frequently wended their funereal way through the half-cobbled 
streets. We found amusement, too, in a local courtroom, where jus- 
tice was dispensed by a common-sense old judge in an informal, un- 
biased way that seemed strange in a Latin-American atmosphere, par- 
ticularly so in a country where a bare five years before most decisions 
went to the highest bidder. The improvement suggested that Santo 
Domingo could be a success so long as some overwhelming power holds 
it steady by appointing the better class of officials and keeping an 
exacting eye constantly upon them. A third point of interest which 
no visitor to the Macoris of the north should neglect is a chat with 
" old man Castillo." Born in 1834, his mind still extremely active, 
this grandson of old Spain has been one of the chief sources of in- 
formation to the wiser Marine commanders of the district. His per- 
sonal reminiscences of Haitian rule, how as a boy he marvelled at the 
high hats and gorgeous but often ludicrously patched uniforms of the 
black troops from the west, make a colorful picture worth beholding, 
even were he not the only surviving general of the war, contemporary 
with our own struggle between the north and the south, that brought 
the final expulsion of Spanish rule from Santo Domingo. His sum- 
ming up of the present status of the revolutionary republic is that of 
nearly all the conservative, thoughtful element of the population. For 
twenty years he had been convinced that intervention would be for 



216 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the future good of the country ; for at least ten he had ardently desired 
it; he would consider it a national misfortune to have it withdrawn 
before a new generation has been thoroughly cured of the empleomania 
and unruliness which had become the curse of Dominican life. Mis- 
takes had been made by the forces of occupation, rather Ly subordinates 
than by the higher command, but the whole list of them, he was con- 
vinced, had been easier to bear than the least of their constantly recur- 
ring revolutions. 

The engine that had dragged us up to the edge of the vega had not 
sufficiently recovered from its exertions to venture down again, and the 
locomotive from the main line was forced to delay its appointed task 
to come and get us. It is typical of the easy-going charm of the 
tropics that the engineer of the day before had profanely declined to 
exchange his coal-fed steed for that of his colleague from the east, 
despite telegraphic orders from the master of transportation, duly and 
officially transmitted through the station agent, hence our not unpre- 
cedented delay. Beyond the junction of La Jina the densely green 
vega changed gradually to broad, brown savannahs not unlike our own 
Western prairies. These slowly gave place again to mata, uncultivated 
half -wilderness with flat open spaces. Pimentel, a considerable town 
at which travelers to the more important one of Cotui changed from 
car seats to saddles, was followed by Villa Riva on the Yuma, the 
largest river in the West Indies and navigable for small schooners. 
The landscape grew still more open, with immense trees casting here 
and there the round •shadows of noonday and cacao beans drying on rude 
raised platforms or on leaf-mats spread frankly upon the ground be- 
fore every bohio, or thatch and palm-trunk dwelling. Royal palm 
trees stretched in close but broken formation across the flatlands and 
on up over a high ridge like the soldiers of an arboreal army in dis- 
ordered rout. Then the train rumbled out across a swampy region 
where the flanges of the rails were frequently covered by the brackish 
water and the exhausted engine stumbled into Sanchez only three hours 
late. 

Strewn along the base of a rocky wooded ridge on the inner curve 
of the great horseshoe bay of Samana, Sanchez is not much to look at 
despite its considerable importance, from a Dominican point of view, 
as the chief northeastern port and the headquarters of the " Scotch 
line." Several large sheet-iron warehouses and a long wooden pier 
sprinkled with cacao beans and the plentiful cinders of a switch engine 
are its chief features. Since the virtual repeal o-f the export tax on 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 217 

cacao, with " Big George " and the new real estate taxation to take 
its place, its activity has somewhat increased. 

Like many another corner of Santo Domingo, mosquito- and gnat- 
bitten Sanchez would be a dreary spot indeed but for the presence of 
our little force of occupation. The natives themselves recognise this, 
as their constant appeals for medical attention, from the uninvited 
strangers demonstrate. With the possible exception of the capital, the 
republic is so scantily supplied with physicians that the navy doctors 
who have the health of the marines in their keeping are permitted to 
engage in civil practice. Even in Santiago, with its 20,000 inhabi- 
tants, the great majority of the population had hitherto no other remedy 
for their varied ailments than the sticking of a green leaf on each 
temple. The bright youth of the country saw no reason to submit 
to the arduous training incident to the medical profession when the 
study of revolutionary tactics promised so much quicker results. 
Small wonder the poor ignorant populace, knowing no better course 
to take, repair in their illness to the Santo Cerro, there to smear them- 
selves with holy dirt in the ardent hope of improvement ; and it may 
be that the simple priests who abet them in those absurd antics are not 
so rascally as they seem from our loftier point of view, for they too 
may in their ignorance be more or less sincere believers in this non- 
sense. 

Sanchez saw, though it may not have noted, the breaking up of our 
congenial quartet. " Mac " had received orders to proceed overland 
through the bandit-famed province of Seibo to the capital, and ac- 
cepted my protection and guidance on the journey. That region being 
a " restricted district " for women, Rachel was forced to submit to the 
tender mercies of the Clyde Line ; while " Big George," whether through 
devotion to duty, a disparity between his own length and that of his 
salary, or for a newly developed fear of personal violence, herewith 
takes his final leave of this unvarnished tale. 

Three hours in an open motor-boat manned by Marines, close along 
an evergreen shore stretching in a low, cocoanut-clad ridge that died 
away on the eastern horizon, brought the surviving pair of us to Samana. 
Tumbled up the slope of the same ridge, with a harbor sheltered by 
several densely wooded islets, the town was more pleasing than the 
busier Sanchez. Great patches of the surrounding cocoanut forest 
were brown with the ravages of a parasitical disease that attacks 
leaves, branches, and fruit not only of these, but of the cacao plants 



218 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

of the region. Saddle-oxen, once common throughout both divisions 
of the ancient Quisqueya, ambled through the streets, their heads 
raised at a disdainful angle by the reins attached to their nose-rings. 
The soft soil and the frequent rains of the Samana peninsula account 
for their survival here in spite of the ascending price of beef and 
leather. This, too, was a town of bullet-holes, for revolutionists have 
frequently found its isolation and its custom-house particularly to their 
liking. It is a rare house that cannot show a scar or two, and both 
the sheet-iron Methodist churches are patched like the garments of 
a Haitian pauper. 

The existence of two such anomalies in a single town of Catholic 
Santo Domingo calls the attention to the most interesting feature of 
Samana, an American negro colony of some two thousand members 
scattered about the peninsula. Nearly a century ago, when the black 
troops from beyond the Massacre had overrun the entire island, the 
Haitian king, president, or emperor, as he happened at the moment to 
be called, opened negotiations with an abolition society in the United 
States with the hope of attracting immigration. Several shiploads of 
blacks, all Northern negroes who had escaped or bought their freedom, 
responded to the invitation. Most of them came from Pennsylvania, 
Ohio, and New Jersey ; one of the towns of the peninsula is still known 
as Bucks County in memory of the exiles from that part of the first- 
named state. Numbers of the new-comers foiled the purpose of the 
Haitian ruler by quickly dying of tropical diseases ; a very few found 
their way back to the United States. The survivors settled down on 
the five acres of land each that had been granted them, the Haitians 
having frankly ignored all other promises. 

Their descendants of the fourth or fifth generation are proud to 
this day of their " American " origin. They hail one in the streets of 
Samana and lose no time in establishing their special identity, in a 
naive, respectful manner that has all but disappeared among their 
brethren in our own land. Scattered over all the Samana peninsula, 
some of them have been absorbed by the Dominicans, but a considerable 
colony has never inter-married with the natives and still retains the 
speech and customs their ancestors brought with them. The majority 
are farmers, moderately well-to-do, living miles out in the country and 
only now and then riding to town on horse- or ox-back. Unlike most 
of their neighbors they do not live in concubinage, but are married in 
their own churches. They are not liked by the Dominicans, who seem 
to resent their superior education and customs, though all admit that 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 219 

they are good citizens and good workers, though not fighters, as 
Americans on custom border control soon discovered. Bigger men 
both physically and mentally than the natives, they live in what seem 
real homes compared with the miserable dirt-floor huts of the Domin- 
icans of the same color. Wherever a glimpse through a doorway shows 
comfort, cleanliness, and a shelf of books one is almost sure to find 
English spoken. It is a remarkably pure English, too, for a tongue 
that has been cut off from its source for nearly a century, far superior 
to that of the British West Indies, though with certain peculiarities 
of negro accent. With rare exceptions the " Americans " do not mix 
in politics, though they were frequently forced to fight on one side 
or the other during the revolutions, because neutrals, abhorred like a 
vacuum, lost both liberty and property no matter which side won. In 
such times no protection was given non-combatants, except to for- 
eigners, and the "American" negroes of Samana are legally Domi- 
nicans despite their protests. One cannot but be proud of the strength 
of American influence, of the compliment to our civilization which is 
implied by the insistence of these exiles on keeping a sort of separate 
nationality, by the strong tendency toward good citizenship they have 
maintained through all their generations. 

In a little parsonage on the edge of town lives the Rev. James, pastor 
of the A. M. E. church, and temporarily in charge also of the Wesleyan 
place of worship, locally known as St. Peter's. His bishop, curiously 
enough, lives in Detroit. Pastor James is a full-blooded negro whose 
male ancestors have been ministers for generations. Sent to the 
Northern States for his final schooling, like many children of the 
colony, he worked his way through Beloit College. His wide fund of 
information on all subjects would make many of our own ministers 
seem narrow by comparison ; yet he has little of that curious mixture 
of humility and arrogance which is so common among educated 
negroes. Even in such minor details as refraining from the use of 
tobacco his personal habits are a contrast to the often licentious lives 
of Dominican priests. In his fairly voluminous library so rare in 
Santo Domingo, such books as " Up from Slavery," " Negro Aspira- 
tions," and many other tomes, magazines, and encyclopedias of a seri- 
ous — and what is more, not merely religious — nature attract the eye. 

Each of the churches has some three hundred members, many of 
whom ride in from miles around on Sundays. Inside the bullet-rid- 
dled edifices the un-Catholic pews, the mottoes in English over the pul- 
pits, the old-fashioned organs all add to the American atmosphere. 



220 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

A third church is maintained in the region, and the colony has several 
schools of its own. Among the best American influences the colonists 
have retained is the un-Dominican tendency to help themselves and 
not depend upon the government in such matters. Complete segrega- 
tion of sexes, from the. youngest pupils to the teachers, has been adopted 
in these schools, where both Spanish and English are taught. Un- 
like Haiti, Santo Domingo grants such institutions no government aid. 
The pastor receives half his salary from mission funds from the 
United States, and the other half not at all, because local contributions 
are eaten up by educational requirements. 

The Rev. James has a fund of stories, more amusing to the hearer 
than to the teller, for those who care to listen. During one of the 
last revolutions, for instance, the town was attacked during services, 
and the congregation, putting more faith in self-help than in super- 
natural aid, stopped in the middle of a prayer to cut a hole through 
the church floor, and remained on the ground beneath until Monday 
morning. The colony, in the opinion of its pastor, is eager to have 
American occupation continue, or at least to have the United States take 
possession of the bay of Samana, as it has that of Guantanamo in 
Cuba, that forces may be close at hand to curb revolutions. Influ- 
ential Dominicans, he is convinced, prefer the present status, with the 
exception, of course, of the politicians, and even the rank and file are 
beginning to see the error of their former ways and to wish peace, 
security, and no more destruction of their farms and herds more than 
complete national independence. On the whole it is remarkable how 
this colony has maintained its customs intact through all the long years 
since its establishment. Once given a good start the negro seems to 
endure the deteriorating influences of the tropics better than the white 
man. The Rev. James, four generations removed from the temperate 
zone, is far more of a credit to civilization than many a Caucasian who 
has lived a mere twenty years in equatorial lands. 

Samana has a French, or, more exactly, a Haitian colony dating 
back to the same period, hence many of its inhabitants speak English, 
Spanish, and " creole." This portion of the population, living chiefly 
in the far outskirts, is as much inferior to the Dominicans as the latter 
are to the " Americans." Neapolitans and " Turks " monopolize most 
of the commerce, and as usual do no productive labor. Coffee was 
formerly grown in some quantity on the peninsula, but cacao was 
planted in its place when the latter began to command high prices. 
Now that the blight has attacked this and there is hardly enough of 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 221 

the former produced for local use, exports are slight. Bananas could 
be grown in abundance; oranges are so plentiful that the town boys 
play marbles with them, but there is no market, or rather no transporta- 
tion for such bulky products, which are sold only in small quantities 
to passing ships for their own use. 

Among the sights of the town is a fine new cockpit as carefully 
planned as our metropolitan theaters. It resembles a tiny bull-ring, 
the fighting space surrounded by upright boards painted a bright red, 
a comfortable gallery rising about the outer circle, ring-side boxes 
furnished with good cane chairs saving the elite the annoyance of mix- 
ing with the collarless rank and file. Cozy little dens for the fighting 
cocks open directly into the ring; a bright new thatched roof shades 
spectators and feathered gladiators alike ; an outer wall of yagita rises 
just high enough to give the breeze free play, yet at the same time to 
prevent the tallest citizen from seeing the contest without paying his 
peseta at the neat little ticket window. The " American " residents 
roll pious eyes at the mention of this nefarious sport. Not merely do 
they consider it beneath them to attend such exhibitions, but look upon 
them as a particularly sinful way of losing caste, since they are always 
held on the " holy Sabbath." 

We sailed across the bay on the mailboat Nereida, a wretched little 
single-masted derelict no larger than an average lifeboat. Though its 
bottom was already heaped with broken rock ballast, an incredible load 
of American patent medicine, of flour, rum, soap, cigarettes, sprouted 
onions, cottonseed oil, and sundry odds and ends was tumbled into 
it before the mails finally put in an appearance an hour after sailing 
time. Nine passengers and a crew of two, all negroes except " Mac " 
and myself, crowded the frequently sea-washed deck. What our fate 
would have been had one of the sudden squalls for which West Indian 
waters are noted overtaken us it was all too easy to imagine. 

A steady wind on the beam carried us diagonally across the gulf 
in the general direction of our destination without the necessity of 
tacking. The shore we were leaving was the scene of the first blood- 
shed between Columbus and the aborigines of the New World, the 
forerunner of countless massacres. The bay was once offered to the 
United States by a Dominican president, but a single congressman 
caused us to decline the honor. Tiny fishing boats with palm-leaf 
sails ventured a few miles out from the land, then abandoned to us 
the seascape, which remained unbroken until we neared the southern 



222 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

shore well on in the afternoon. Constant quarrels between the two 
halves of the crew on the advisability of tacking or not tacking en- 
livened all our snail-like, zigzag course along the face of the land, and 
black night had come before we climbed over the water-soaked cargo 
to the drunken pier of Jovero. 

A gawky village of some six hundred inhabitants, boasting only one 
two-story house, this out-of-the-world place was quickly thrown into 
a furore of curiosity over its unexpected white visitors. Even the 
commander of the gnardia detachment was a native lieutenant; the 
most nearly Caucasian resident was the town treasurer, a young 
" Turk " from Tripoli, in the back of whose more than general store 
we were finally served a much needed meal. With three thousand per- 
sons in the region only two copies of a weekly newspaper, according 
to the post master, brought them the world's -news, and that was a 
pathetic little sheet from across the bay. No wonder false rumors 
have a free field in such a community. Cattle, pigs, cacao, and an 
unseasoned tobacco sold in mouldy-scented rolls six feet long, called 
andullos, made up the scanty exports of the district. Barely one per 
cent, of its territory is under cultivation, for like all the province of 
SeibO' bandits still harass it long after the rest of the republic has been 
pacified. 

Under superior orders the native lieutenant assigned a sergeant and 
eleven men of the guardia to accompany us through the bandit haunts 
beyond. As they lined up for final inspection they were spick and 
span out of all parallel in my tropical experience, from newly ironed 
breeches to oiled rifles ; ten minutes later they were marching knee- 
deep through a river in the well-polished shoes they would gladly have 
left behind had American discipline permitted it. Their own fault, 
I mused, for they might have spent some of their ample garrison leisure 
in building a bridge ; but I soon withdrew the mental criticism. A 
single bridge would not much have improved that route. It consisted 
of a wide cleared space through the mountainous forest, and nothing 
more — rather less, in fact, for in many places neither the stumps or 
the huge felled trunks had been removed. Streams succeeded one an- 
other in swift succession; the almost constant rains of this region had 
made the steep slopes precarious toboggans of red mud, where they were 
not corduroyed with camclones, slippery ridges of earth with deep 
troughs of muddy water between them. Here and there the guards 
were forced to climb a slimy bank virtually on their hands and knees; 
in other places the mud clung to their feet in hundred-weight ; with the 






TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 223 

densest vegetation on either hand cutting off all suggestion of breeze, 
the sweat dripped from them in streams. Within half an hour the 
bedraggled, soaked, mud-plastered rifle-bearers staggering before and 
behind us along the trail showed slight resemblance indeed to the per- 
fectly starched and polished young men who had been drawn up for 
the lieutenant's inspection. 

" Mac " and I on our sorry mounts were not much better off. It 
was beginning to be apparent why. one can get from Santiago to New 
York more easily and in less time than to the Dominican capital. The 
ex-" top," as a high government official, had been given Jovero's best 
mule, but it would be easy to imagine a better one. My own steed had 
long since become a candidate for the glue factory and his suffering 
air had already riddled my conscience before a shifting of the saddle- 
cloth disclosed an open sore on his back larger than my two hands. 
Santo Domingo needs such a law as that with which we cured the 
Canal Zone of this heartless Latin-American custom of working their 
animals in a mutilated condition. But what could one do under the 
circumstances but urge on the suffering beast? We had come too far 
for me to turn back in the faint hope of getting another mount ; it was 
as necessary to reach Seibo as it was not to leave " Mac " in the lurch, 
and even had I taken to my feet along with the mud-caked guards the 
. abandoned animal would have been almost certain to fall into the still 
less compassionate hands of the bandits. 

Precautions against the latter now began to be taken in earnest. 
We were approaching a labyrinth of sharp gullies and high hills which 
had always been a favorite lurking-place of the outlaws. Any turn of 
the now narrow trail would have made a splendid ambush. Drench- 
ing showers at frequent intervals made it easy for the ruffians to sneak 
up through the bush unheard ; the heavy humidity of a tropical rainy 
season deadens sounds even when the sun shines. The sergeant ar- 
ranged his men in skirmish formation, with strict orders not to " bunch 
up " under any circumstances. A barefoot native on horseback, who 
had overtaken us soon after our departure from Jovero, was forbid- 
den to ride ahead of the party. We had no means of knowing whether 
his assertion that he had hastened to join us for safety's sake, after 
waiting a fortnight for a chance to make the journey, was truth or pre- 
tense. These preparations concluded, we moved forward ready for 
instant battle. 

Nothing of the kind occurred. I might have known it would not ; 
there is no greater Jonah on earth than I for scaring off adventure. 



224 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Trails worn deeper than a horseman's head and so narrow as to rub 
our elbows offered attackers comparative immunity; the dense jungle 
might easily have concealed a score of men within a yard or two on 
either side of us ; the steepness of the mountain-top, forcing us to 
dismount and drag our weary, stumbling animals behind us, left us 
scant breath to spend in physical combat, yet nothing but the deep, op- 
pressive silence of a tropical wilderness enlivened our laborious prog- 
ress. By the time the summit was reached we were ready to believe 
that the bandits of Seibo were a myth. An unbroken expanse of 
vegetation, dark green everywhere, spread away to the limitless south- 
ern horizon. Yet the rains ceased abruptly at the crest of the range, 
and the trail that carried us swiftly downward was as dry as the 
Sahara. 

The sergeant gradually relaxed his vigilance and let his men once 
more straggle along at will, though he watched closely the rare trav- 
elers who began to appear. Several of the guards, I found, as we 
grouped together again for a rest, spoke to one another in Samana 
English rather than Spanish. When I gave a cheering word in the 
latter tongue to a ragged native civilian who had plodded at my horse's 
heels since the beginning of the journey, he glanced up at me with 
an expression of incomprehension and asked the guard behind him 
to interpret my remark. He was Canadian born, had been seven years 
in the sugar fields of Cuba without learning a word of Spanish, and 
had been robbed by Haitian cacos of everything except his tattered hat, 
shirt and trousers. " Nobody told me there were that kind of people 
in that country," he explained, plaintively, " I never thought such things 
of people of my color." The wisdom gained from that unexpected 
experience developed a precaution that had held him nearly three weeks 
in Jovero awaiting a safe opportunity to proceed to the sugar district 
of southeastern Santo Domingo. 

We were soon down on the flatlands again, but it was a long time 
before the first signs of cultivation broke the dreary wilderness. This 
was a cacao canuco, or tiny plantation, overgrown with brush and 
weeds and with the scarred ruins of a hut in one corner of it. More 
of them lined the way for mile after mile, all abandoned for the past 
three years, fear of the bandits making it impossible even to pick the] 
pods that ripened, rotted, and fell beneath the trees. These endless 
gardens choked with weeds made this wonderfully fertile valley seem 
doubly pitiful in its uncultivated immensity. The guards, who, after 
the fashion of their kind, had made no provision whatever against a 




A Dominican switch engine 




A Dominican hearse 




American Marines on the march 







A riding horse of Samaria 



TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 225 

long day's hunger, climbed the rotting stick fences and picked half- 
green bananas and papayas, or lechosas, as the Dominican calls them, 
from the untended plantations. At length huts still standing began to 
appear, then inhabited ones, occupied almost exclusively by women, 
showed that we were approaching the safety zone. The creak of 
guinea hens, like rusty hinges, commenced to break the silence ; goats 
took to capering out of our way ; better dressed people of both sexes 
gradually put in an appearance, crowing cocks challenged one another 
in ever increasing number, and at sunset the again road-wide trail be- 
came the main street of the town of Seibo. 

The capital of a province without so much as the pretense of a 
hotel is a rarity even in backward Santo Domingo. Nothing but the 
most miserable of thatched huts, with three human nests on legs in one 
tiny room, and a back-yard reed kitchen attended by a ragged old 
negro crone, offers accommodation to unbefriended strangers in Seibo. 
It is perhaps the most out-of-the-way, astonished-at-strangers, unac- 
quainted-with-the-world town of any size that can be found in the 
West Indies. Though a large detachment of marines camp at its 
bandit-threatened door, it showed unbounded surprise to see American 
civilians. Groups of almost foppishly dressed men lounged about its 
streets, yet the town itself was little short of filthy. A curious old 
domed church, some of it built four hundred years ago, its original 
color faded to a spotted pale-blue, and its aged square tower surmounted 
by a marine wireless apparatus, is the only building of importance. 
From the top of this, or the one other place in town where one can go 
upstairs, Seibo is seen to be surrounded by low hills, everywhere 
wooded, without a hut outside its compact mass, its skirts drawn up 
like those of a nervous old maid in constant dread of mice. The in- 
evitable fortress that gives Haitian and Dominican villages a likeness to 
the castle-crowned towns of medieval Italy watches over it from a 
near-by knoll and houses its guardia garrison. Built almost entirely 
of wood, the low houses of the better class are roofed with sheet-iron, 
the poorer with palm-leaf thatch. It has no plaza but merely a stony 
plowed rectangle of unoccupied ground in its center. The public school 
has no doors between its rooms, hence is a constant uproar of teachers 
and classes shouting against one another. Seibo bears the reputation 
of being always " agin' the gover'ment," and it is not strange that we 
found its people somewhat more surly toward Americans than those 
of the Cibao. 

That did not hinder them from obeying " Mac's " official commands 



226 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

with fitting alacrity, however, whether they were a hint to shop-keepers 
to display their licenses as the law required or a whisper to his local 
subordinates to correct their methods. The slip-shod ways of native 
rule cannot long endure where an exacting American official drops in 
unexpectedly every now and then to inspect things down to the slightest 
detail. Such close-rein methods are indispensable to the proper func- 
tioning of revenue laws in Santo Domingo. Your Latin-American 
can seldom rise to the point of impersonal application of governmental 
decrees; with him it is always a personal matter between official and 
inhabitant. Checked up in the courteous yet firm manner which " Mac " 
had learned by long contact with this race, hh subordinates had a 
curious resemblance to backward schoolboys whom a teacher holds up 
to scratch by frequent kindly assistance with a threat of the switch 
behind it. The government of occupation has done everything pos- 
sible to remove temptation from both inspected and inspector in in- 
ternal revenue matters.. Every distillery, for instance, is so con- 
structed that the owner may watch his product behind iron bars as it 
runs from still to receptacle, yet not a drop can he extract without 
calling upon the inspector to produce his keys. By such contrivances 
Santo Domingo is being gradually weaned away from the irregulari- 
ties that were long the curse of its financial legislation. 

An invitation from the major in command caused us to change with 
alacrity on our second day in Seibo from the " hotel " to a tent in the 
marine camp on the edge of town, with a far-reaching view, an un- 
failing breeze, and a " swimming hole " in the river below. Here, 
by dint of spending most of the day insisting, by offering twice the 
local rate for good mounts, by promising a peon " guide " a week's 
pay for a day's work, by seeing that the horses were within the marine 
corral before going to bed, and by being generally and strictly from 
Missouri, we succeeded in getting off the next morning at five. The 
air was damp and fresh. For the first time in five years I beheld the 
Southern Cross I had once known like the features of an old friend. 
Endless forests with a level roadway cut through them shut us in all 
through the morning, only a few canncos breaking the perspective of 
sheer forest walls. As in Haiti, the peasants of Seibo live back out of 
sight from the main trails, for fear of bandits, as the vicinity of some 
of our railroads is still shunned out of dread of marauding tramps. 
At another large marine camp we left the roadway and sagging tele- 
graph wire to La Romana and struck due southward along a half- 
cleared trail that after an hour or more brought us out upon the sun- 






TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO 227 

toasted advance guard of the cane-fields of the south. Amid the stumps 
and logs of immense tropical trees, black with the recent burning, baby 
sugar-cane was already turning bright green the broad expanse of 
newly felled forest. Negroes almost without exception from the 
French or British West Indies were adding row after row of the 
virgin fields to the sugar supply of a hungry world. Farther on, be- 
yond another strip of forest soon due for the same fate, came im- 
mense stretches of full-sized cane, then toiling groups of cane-cutters, 
huge creaking cane-carts, finally a railroad that scorns to carry any- 
thing but cane, and by ten we had brought up at the batey of Diego, 
our mounted " guide " straggling in far behind us. 

Many of the workmen of the surrounding " colonies " had gone on 
strike that morning. The Dominican delegate to the recent labor 
conference in Washington had brought back with him this new method 
of bringing to terms the " wicked American and Cuban capitalists who 
would starve us while carrying off our national wealth." It was no- 
ticeable, however, that only a small fraction of the idle groups crowd- 
ing the batey were natives of the country ; the great majority of them 
grumbled in the easy-going drawl of the British negro. Small wonder 
the arguments of the Spanish-speaking manager who harangued them 
from the door of the office fell chiefly on uncomprehending ears. Be- 
sides, though their own arguments were simpler, they were not easily 
refuted. " Wi' rice twenty-fi' cent a pound an' sugah eighteen cent in 
Macoris town what y'u go'n' a do, mahn, what y'u go'n' a do? An' 
de washer lady she ax you a shilling fo' to wash a shirt ! How us can 
cut a caht-load o 5 canes fo' seventy cent? Better fo' we if us detain 
we at home." 

Leaving manager and strikers to settle their differences without our 
assistance we climbed to the top of a car-load of cane and were soon 
creaking away across the slightly rolling country. A train so long 
that it had to be cut in two at the first suggestion of a grade squirmed 
away before us like a great green snake. The land became one vast 
expanse of sugar-cane, broken only by the clustered buildings of the 
bateys and dotted here and there by a royal palm or ceiba, which the 
woodsmen had not had the heart to fell. Branch railroads, like the 
ribs of a leaf, brought the product of all this down to the main line, 
whence it poured into the capacious -maw of the Central Santa Fe, 
the tall chimneys of which appeared toward sunset, backed far off by 
a slightly yellowish Caribbean. 

San Pedro de Macoris on the southern coast is a more important 



228 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

town than its near namesake of the Cibao, yet it is disappointing for 
all its size. With a certain amount of modern bustle, more city fea- 
tures than we had seen since Santiago, a fair percentage of full white 
inhabitants, and a rather " cocky " air, it exists chiefly because of a 
bottle-shaped harbor with a dangerously narrow entrance between reefs, 
while its docks are largely manned by British negroes. 

We finally found passengers enough to afford the trip by automo- 
bile from Macoris to the capital. With the single exception of the 
Haitian journey to Las Cahobas, I have never known of a worse road 
being actually covered by automobile. Sandy or stony beyond words, 
a constant succession of rocks, stumps, scrub trees, sun-baked mud- 
holes, without a yard of smooth going, it was in fact no road at all, 
but so often had travelers followed the same general direction that a 
kind of route had grown up of itself. Several times we came to 
temporary grief ; once we ran into a tree and smashed a case of Cuban 
rum that had been tied on the running-board, and as the chauffeur felt 
impelled to " save " as much of the precious stuff as possible, his driv- 
ing was far from impeccable during the rest of the journey. One 
after another we bounced through such towns as La Yeguada, Hato 
Vie jo, Santa Isabela, all spread out carelessly on the flat, dry, prairie- 
like country peculiar to the coral formation of southern Santo Domingo. 
In one place the m-ud was so deep that we were forced to turn aside for 
a few yards into the private property of a Cuban ex-general, who oc- 
cupies a wattled hut with his illegitimate brood of mulattoes. This 
wily individual, in spite of the fact that he draws a generous monthly 
pension through a foreign bank in the capital, has placed a guard at his 
gate and collects two dollars from every passing automobile. Then 
came more sugarcane, another large mill with its creaking ox-carts 
and striking negroes, and from San Isidro on sixteen kilometers of 
excellent highway to Duarte, a suburb of the capital, and across the 
Ozama river into Santo Domingo City. The American governor of 
the republic had recently made the official announcement that sixty per 
cent, of the great national highway from the capital to Monte Cristi 
was already completed ! He could scarcely have taken his own words 
seriously had he been privileged to follow us in the opposite direction. 



CHAPTER X 

SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 

THIS is not the place to recapitulate in detail the busy history 
of Santo Domingo, — how the island of Quisqueya, or Haiti, 
was discovered by Columbus on his first voyage and named 
Hispaniola ; how it was gradually settled by the Spaniards, who as 
usual massacred the aborigines and imported African slaves in their 
place to cultivate the newly introduced sugarcane ; how French 
buccaneers from Tortuga eventually conquered the western end of the 
island and were recognized by having a governor sent out from France ; 
how battles raged to and fro between the French and the Spaniards 
until something like the present frontier between Haiti and Santo 
Domingo was established ; how the English expedition sent out by 
Cromwell was repulsed and contented themselves with occupying Ja- 
maica instead; how the negroes of Haiti at length rose against their 
masters and drove the French from the island, then ruled the whole 
of it for twenty-two years; how the Republica Dominicana won her 
independence from Spain, voluntarily surrendered it again, regained 
it in 1865, and entered into that career of constantly recurring revolu- 
tions, in which the winner always became president and his supporters 
the possessors of the public revenues, that eventually led to the present 
American occupation. The interest of the modern reader is more apt 
to begin with this century. In 1906, in order to keep Germany, Bel- 
gium, Italy, and several other creditors from landing in Santo Domingo 
to collect the debts of their nationals, the United States advanced $20,- 
000,000 and took over the custom houses as security. The following 
year the United States and the Dominican Republic signed a conven- 
tion under which the former was to appoint a receiver for bankrupt 
Santo Domingo, five per cent, of the custom receipts to cover the 
expenses of the receivership and a certain amount to be set aside to 
pay off the national debts and provide a sinking fund. The convention 
further stipulated that Santo Domingo could not contract new public 
indebtedness without American consent, and that the United States 
could intervene if conditions within the country threatened to interfere 
with the collection of the custom duties. 

229 



2 3 o ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

The Dominicans soon broke the former agreement. The govern- 
ment illegally sold revenue stamps at a fraction of their value ; pagarcs 
were issued at great discounts ; goods «were purchased in the United 
States and abroad without being paid for or legally sanctioned. In 
five years following 1907 there were six presidents, including the Arch- 
bishop. In 191 1 Caceres was shot by his own cabinet members be- 
cause they were not allowed to graft enough. The United States 
superintended the elections of 1914, with the understanding that all 
parties should abide by the result. A hard task that for the Dominicans. 
Within a year another revolution broke out, secretly sponsored either 
by the president himself for the advantage it would give the govern- 
ment in spending power, or by the opposition party, led by the minister 
of war. This outbreak was soon suppressed. In 1916 President 
Jimenez had barely retired to his summer palace when this same De- 
cjderio Arias, a turbulent cacique who had been given the war port- 
folio in the hope of keeping him quiet, decided that his chief should 
never return to the capital. Supported by the military forces, with 
the police split between the two factions, this coup d'etat was on the 
point of winning, when, at the end of April, 1916, the American Min- 
ister sent word that there was trouble again in Santo Domingo. Then 
the United States, which had " offered its good services " many times 
before and endured Dominican conditions with far too much patience, 
decided to act. An ultimatum was sent to Arias announcing that the 
United States would no longer permit the establishment of govern- 
ment by revolution. Marines from Haiti had been landed at Fort 
San Geronimo with orders to support the government of Jimenez, 
and with his clandestine approval, and took the capital with little diffi- 
culty. The president publicly repudiated his secret agreement, in spite 
of having everything in his favor, and announcing in a bombastic pro- 
nunciamento that his " dignity " would not permit him to endure a 
foreign military occupation, resigned with all his government. For 
this the marines were duly thankful ; it simplified the whole problem. 

Meanwhile a force had landed at Puerto Plata and at Monte Cristi, 
and fought their way overland, suffering considerably from snipers on 
the way. Arias, who had escaped with all his supporters from the un- 
protected side of the city, hurried to the Cibao and attempted to hinder 
the marine advance,' but was forced to surrender with the capture of 
Santiago. His power was still paramount in the capital, however, and 
he forced congress to make Hernandez y Carbajal, who had returned 
from long exile in Cuba, president. The United States refused to 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 231 

recognise this illegal election and declined to let the government have 
any money, with the result that the country was left without rulers. 
Finally American military occupation was proclaimed and our forces 
took over the entire government of Santo Domingo, a status compared 
with which the mere " advisory " one of our marines in Haiti was far 
more complicated, and has remained so to this day. 

When the Americans took over Santo Domingo the republic was 
millions in debt — something like $40 per capita, to be exact — com- 
pletely bankrupt, and the salaries of all but the higher officials were 
long in arrears. Now, after less than four years of occupation, there 
is some $4,000,000 in the treasury. The new land tax alone — which 
it has been impossible to duplicate in Haiti, where laws are still made by 
a native congress, — has already produced nearly a million. Most of 
this goes back to the municipalities. The old taxes bore far more on 
the poor man than on the man of property. Moreover, the govern- 
ment of occupation has collected more than three times as much from 
these older sources than was the case under native rule, chiefly be- 
cause there is no tax-gatherer's graft and the friends of the govern- 
ment are no longer let off unpaid. Every disbursement is now paid by 
check, on voucher in duplicate, and the same man cannot buy and pay. 
A few American civilians in supervising positions receive their salaries 
from Dominican funds — and render many times value received. The 
great bulk of the higher officials are of no expense whatever to the na- 
tives, being members of our military forces drawing their pay from 
the United States treasury. 

The sovereignty of the Republica Dominicana has never ceased. Its 
functions are merely administered by representatives of the United 
States Navy and Marine Corps, officially called " The Military Govern- 
ment of the United States in Santo Domingo." There is no president 
or congress. Even the laws are made by the military governor, an 
American admiral. There have been no elections since our occupation ; 
all officials down to the least important are appointed, directly or in- 
directly, by the Americans. The latter control all financial matters 
and exercise supervision over the official acts even of the smallest 
municipalities. American money, chiefly torn, patched, sewn, dirty, 
half-illegible bills, constitutes the circulating medium. On the other 
hand, the republic has its own schools, courts, and minor officials. 
The Dominican flag flies from all public buildings except American 
headquarters. In short, in so far as any definite policy has ever been 



232 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

announced, we are in Santo Domingo to do exactly what we did in 
Cuba. 

The Americans found the whole question of land titles one of in- 
credible chaos and fraud. Not only wore there few definite deeds 
in existence, but the country was overrun with what are known as 
" peso titles." In the old days the King of Spain gave grants of land 
without any conception of the limits thereof, often supremely ignorant 
of its whereabouts. Not infrequently the same parcel was given to 
three or four of his faithful subjects. The grantees, who in many 
cases had never seen their property, divided their holdings among 
several children. The latter had no clear idea either of the amount 
or the location of their property. So they said, " Well, I think it is 
worth so many pesos," whereupon each child was given his fraction 
of that amount — on paper — and thus the subdivision went on through 
many generations. Thousands of these " peso titles " were sold to 
speculators, 6r to natives or foreigners who had worse than hazy 
ideas of their worth. Then on top of this there grew up a big business 
in fake titles. As many as four thousand have been presented, where 
fewer than four hundred showed any evidence of being real. More- 
over, the real ones, being often hundreds of years old and written by 
men who could neither spell nor find proper writing materials, were 
more apt to look spurious than did the false ones. To clear up this 
intolerable situation the Americans decreed that all land titles not 
proved up to a certain date reverted to the government. The ruling- 
caused some injustices, but these were unavoidable under the cir- 
cumstances and as nothing compared with the old order of things. 
The introduction of a land tax also has caused many who might other- 
wise have drifted on in the good old tropical way to clear up their 
titles. A certain amount of litigation between the government and 
individuals is still going on, but the whole problem is gradually com- 
ing to an orderly solution. 

Another question which the Americans faced upon their arrival 
was the disarming of the country. It had long been the custom in 
Santo Domingo for even the small boys to carry revolvers. Among 
the weapons were many costly pearl-handled ones ; most of them had 
been manufactured in Springfield, Mass., or Hartford, Conn. A date 
was set when all firearms must be turned in to the military govern- 
ment. The penalty for non-compliance was at first made very severe. 
There are men still serving sentence in the road-gangs of Santo 
Domingo for having guns in their possession three years ago. At 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 233 

present the standard punishment is six months' imprisonment and 
$300 fine. With the exception of the bandit-infested province of 
Seibo, the entire country has now been completely cleared of firearms, 
at least those in actual use. Some, to be sure, are buried or hidden 
away in the jungle, but time and the rust of tropical climates will soon 
take care of those. The Americans burned whole roomsful of rifles; 
more than 200,000 revolvers have been thrown into the sea outside the 
capital. To-day it is difficult even for provincial officials to get per- 
mission to carry a shooting iron. 

As in other lands under temporary or permanent American rule, 
from Haiti to the Philippines, a native constabulary was organized. 
The Guardia National of Santo Domingo, consisting at present of a 
company of some eighty men in each of the fourteen provinces, has 
the same organization as the Marine Corps. Its members enlist for 
three years, and privates get $15 a month. Their uniform lacks only 
the hat ornament and somewhat more durable dye-stuffs to be an ex- 
act copy of that of our " leather-necks." The only difference in equip- 
ment is the " Krag Jorgensen " instead of the "Springfield." The 
officers are marines, usually sergeants, except in the higher commands 
and a very few natives who have climbed to " shave-tail " rank. All 
commands are given in English. A " non-com." can put his men 
through the whole drill in that language, yet if you ask him his name, 
the answer is almost certain to be " No hablo Ingles." Unlike the 
Gendarmerie of Haiti the Guardia is confined in its duties to matters 
of national defense; municipal police still keep order in the cities. 
We got the impression during our short stay that the Guardia officers 
were not quite the equal of those of the Gendarmerie. For one thing 
the pay is less attractive, though that of the men is fifty per cent, higher. 
Recently, too, all marine sergeants holding commissioned rank in the 
Guardia have unwisely been reduced to privates during their absence 
from their permanent organizations, with the unfortunate result that 
the few native lieutenants get more pay than their American captains, 
unless the latter are also commissioned officers of the Marine Corps. 
The native rank and file of the Guardia have a cocky, half-insolent 
air quite foreign to their simpler fellows of Haiti ; they look as if they 
would be better fighters, more clever crooks, and not so easily dis- 
ciplined. 

The cacos of Santo Domingo are called gavilleros, caco in that coun- 
try meaning merely thief or burglar. They are usually armed with 
" pata-mulas " (mule hoofs), which are rifles that have been cut down 



234 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

into revolvers, partly because they are too lazy to carry the whole gun, 
partly because the abbreviation is easier to conceal. In the olden days 
any one with a few hundred dollars could raise an " army," especially 
by making copious promises of government jobs to everyone if — or 
rather, when — his side won. Not until the Americans came were 
these anti-governmental groups called bandits ; they were dignified with 
the title of revolutionaries. Santo Domingo had long run more or 
less wild ; many of its men preferred taking to the hills at fifty cents 
a day with rations and the possibility of loot to doing honest work 
at a dollar a day. As with all Spanish-sired races, the Dominicans 
have the gambling instinct well developed. They love the lotteries 
of life; they would rather take a chance on winning some big prize 
as bandits or revolutionists to toiling in safety at peaceful occupations. 
Then, too, many were forced to join these outlaw bands, lest their 
houses be burned or their families injured. The gavillero situation 
had been bad before the Americans landed. It became worse under 
the occupation, for reasons that we shall see. 

To begin with, Arias released nearly all the criminals in the country 
during his revolt against the Jimenez government. These quickly 
turned bandits ; later on they pretended to be patriots fighting the 
American occupation. As a matter of fact the majority of them 
were fighting for food, rather than for either political or patriotic 
reasons, but bombast is one of the chief qualities of the Latin-American. 
The forces of occupation might in some ways have handled this bandit 
situation better than they did ; largely because of ignorance of local 
customs, partly because of inefficiency and a certain amount of brutal- 
ity, they made something of a mess of it, or at least let it become more 
serious than it need have done. 

Two regiments of marines are engaged in the occupation of teaching 
the Dominicans how to live without lawlessness — a scant 5000 of them 
among a population of 750,000. Unfortunately there are flaws in all 
organizations. There are marine commanders in Santo Domingo so 
just and broad-minded that they are almost loved by the naturally 
hostile population ; there were others who have little real conception 
of their duties. The rascally, brutal, worthless, " Diamond Dick " 
class of American sometimes gets into the Marine Corps as into every- 
thing else and tends to destroy the good name of the majority. Boys 
brought up on dime novels and the movies saw at last a chance to 
imitate their favorite heroes and kill people with impunity: some of 
them, too, were Southerners, to whom the Dominicans after all were 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 235 

only "niggers." The great majority of the forces of occupation were 
well meaning young fellows who often lacked experience in distinguish- 
ing outlaws from honest citizens, with the result that painful injustices 
were sometimes committed. 

These ignorant, or movie-trained, young fellows were sent out into 
the hills to hunt bandits. They came upon a hut, found it unoccupied, 
and touched a match to the nipe thatch. They probably thought such 
a hovel was of no importance anyway, even if it were not a bandit 
haunt, whereas it contained all the earthly possessions of a harmless 
family. In their ignorance of local customs they could not know that 
the entire household was out working in their jungle yuca-garden. 
Or they found only the women and children at home, and burned the 
house because these could not explain where their man was. Or again, 
they met a man on the trail and asked him his business, and because 
he could not understand their atrocious imitation of Spanish, or they 
his reply, they shot him to be on the safe side. In still other places they 
burned the houses of innocent accomplices, because bandits had com- 
mandeered food and lodging there. If one can believe half the stories 
that are current in all circles throughout Santo Domingo, the Germans 
in Belgium had nothing on some of our own " leather-necks." 

A parish priest of Seibo, who seemed, if anything, friendly to the 
occupation, told me of several cases of incredible brutality of which 
he had personal knowledge. He could not divulge the secrets of the 
confessional, but he could assure me that many of the victims had been 
innocent even of hostile thoughts. The Guardia, he asserted, included 
some of the worst rascals, thieves, and assassins in the country, men 
far worse than the gavilleros, and these often egged the naive Ameri- 
cans on to vent their own private hates. Scarcely a month before a sad 
personal experience had befallen him. On Christmas Day he had 
gone with acolytes to another town to attend a fiesta, when a drunken 
marine had fired his rifle twice into the wattled hut where it was 
being held and killed a boy of ten who was at that moment swinging 
the censer. 

I cannot vouch for all the padre's statements, but rumors of this 
kind were strikingly prevalent, among natives and Americans all over 
Santo Domingo. On the other hand we must remember that the 
bandit-hunters often have no certain means of telling a gavillero from 
a " good citizen," and they cannot always afford to give a man the 
benefit of the doubt. One is as apt as the other to look like an honest, 
simple, harmless fellow, and there have been sad mistakes on the 



236 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

side of leniency also, which have naturally led to over-caution. The 
Dominican is quite versatile enough to be a bandit one day and to be 
found scratching the ground of his jungle garden with his machete 
the next. Captured gavilleros have boasted that they hid their guns 
in a cane-field when a hostile force appeared, came out and helped the 
marines unsaddle, drank a round with them in the neighboring licoreria, 
and recovered their weapons as soon as the hunters had taken to the 
trail again. The Guardia, too, has not always been free from spies. 
The difficulties of the situation, and the necessity of a wide knowledge 
of local customs and conditions on the part of those sent to handle 
it, is exemplified by the miscarriage of a plan to clear a certain district 
of Seibo of outlaws. The government of occupation ordered all " good 
inhabitants " to come into the towns on a certain day, so that the bad 
ones might be more easily corralled. But the gavilleros have a better 
news service than those who have no particular reason to keep their 
ears to the ground. The former learned of the order, concealed their 
weapons, and hastened into the villages, with the result that those who 
were shot were chiefly honest, simple peasants. 

There have been several battles of importance between the marines 
and the gavilleros since the occupation. The latter are more worthy 
adversaries than the Haitian caeos, though the defeat of a band of four 
hundred by a score of Americans is not considered an extraordinary 
feat. Thanks either to his Spanish antecedents or to his revolutionary 
history, the Dominican has a ferocity and a desprecio of human life 
that makes it unwise to be compassionate. More than thirty marines 
have been killed in Santo Domingo, as against only four in Haiti. 
One band has announced a determination to completely exterminate 
the white foreigners, and makes a practice of horribly mutilating the 
dead and wounded. A persistent rumor has it that one of its leaders 
is an American. 

The story of the killing of the bandit chieftain of Santo Domingo 
is not so heroic as the extermination of Charlemagne in Haiti — nor as 
definite. Vicentico and his men had overrun almost the entire province 
of Seibo. In July, 1917, one account has it, a gunnery sergeant who 
spoke imperfect Spanish went into his district unarmed and in " civies " 
and spent a week in winning the chief's confidence. The Americans, 
he told him, had lost hope of defeating so expert a warrior and would 
make him a general and chief of the Guardia, with places for the best 
of his men, if he would disband his forces and support the occupation. 
Another version is that the real go-between was a " Turk " shop- 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 237 

keeper who had known him in other days. Questions of individual 
glory aside, Vicentico at length set out with seventy picked men to 
report to the marine commander. On the way he was suddenly startled 
to hear one of the wild birds of Seibo utter its peculiar shriek in a 
tree-top above him. 

u You are betraying me ! " cried the chieftain, whirling upon the 
" Turk " — or the sergeant — and covering him with his " pata-mulas." 
" That bird has never failed to warn me of danger." 

The emissary, who was evidently gifted with a superhuman tongue, 
managed to talk his way back into the confidence of the outlaw, and the 
journey proceeded. Arrived at the American headquarters, Vicentico 
marched haughtily in upon the marine colonel, his swarthy face twitch- 
ing with triumph, and announced himself ready to take over the com- 
mand of the Guardia. 

" You are under arrest," said the colonel, dryly. 

" Caramba ! " cried the outlaw, while a detachment of marines dis- 
armed his seventy followers, " I knew I should have listened to that 
bird!" 

Just what happened after that is not very clear, except that it was 
nothing of which to be particularly proud. One version runs that the 
gunnery sergeant entered the outlaw's cell one night and told him, amid 
curses and crocodile tears, that his superiors had repudiated their 
promise, but that he would redeem his own unintentional treachery in 
the matter by helping the bandit to escape at once — whereupon guards 
carefully posted outside met him with a volley sanctioned by the ley de 
fuga of his own race. Another termination of the tale has it that a 
group of marine officers, " lit up after a big party," staggered to the 
prison and vindicated the loss of some of their comrades by shooting 
the outlaw with his handcuffs still on, and without even allowing him 
time to call a priest. Just how much truth there is in these varying 
accounts, or combinations of the two, will probably remain a mystery, 
but even the marines themselves do not often boast of the killing of 
Vicentico. 

Chronic pessimists and sworn enemies of the occupation assert that 
the Americans have made ten bandits for every one they have killed. 
Without taking this statement at par, there is at least a grain of truth 
in the complementary assertion that the killing of Vicentico made all 
Seibo turn gavilleros. In some sections only women, children, and old 
men are seen ; the young bucks have all taken to the hills. The leaders 
that are left have no confidence in Americans, especially those in a 



238 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

marine uniform, and they will no longer enter into negotiations of 
any nature. The province wants revenge for what it considers the 
treacherous betrayal of one of its popular heroes. We should remember 
the time-honored Spanish attitude towards bandits — something mere 
warriors, with no time to study history, cannot be expected to know. 
The government of Spain has always been more or less an oppressor 
of the common people; those who rise against it, either singly or in 
groups, are looked upon somewhat as champions of the helpless masses. 
The favorite heroes of Spanish dramas to this day are bandidos, and 
they are always equally noted for their absolute indifference to personal 
danger and for their knightly code of honor, to say nothing of their 
unfailing generosity toward the poor. It is not hard, therefore, to 
understand why los Americanos fell far down the moral scale of Seibo 
province by their uncaballeresco treatment of Vicentico. 

If I may continue this unprejudiced explanation of things as they 
seemed to be in Santo Domingo at the beginning of 1920 without giving 
the false impression that the great majority of our forces of occupation 
are not a credit to the land of their birth, I would add a word about 
the effect of personal conduct. A few marines, some officers among 
them, vary the monotony of their assignment by starting irregular 
households ; a somewhat larger number take undue advantage of their 
isolation from our new and not too popular constitutional amendment. 
The former lapse would attract but little attention in Santo Domingo, 
where it is almost a national custom, were it not an American habit 
to boast ourselves superior to other races in such matters, at least in 
view-point. The result is a frequent sneering whisper of " hypocrites." 
As to the second, like all Latin races the Dominican is seldom a tee- 
totaler, but he is even more seldom seen under the influence of liquor, 
at least publicly. In a land where any man of standing loses caste by 
the slightest evidence of intoxication, the effect on the popular mind 
of what to their self-appointed rulers is merely a " little celebration " 
is extremely unfortunate. The result of these things, of a certain 
amount of crude autocracy, and a tendency to let red tape have the 
precedence over common sense, is that our forces of occupation are 
far less popular in Santo Domingo than they could be. 

There has been a growing tendency on the part of the Dominicans 
to show their enmity openly. Several outbreaks at dances and fiestas, 
ranging from individual encounters to near-riots, have indicated the 
feeling against Americans. Marine officers dancing with Dominican 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 239 

girls have been subjected to unpleasant scenes. Our men are less 
often invited to native clubs than formerly. A less serious and more 
amusing index, almost universal south of the Rio Grande, is the increas- 
ing refusal to call us Americans. Several newspapers have perma- 
nently adopted the clumsy adjective " Estadunidense." If our South- 
ern neighbors have their way I suppose we shall soon be calling 
ourselves " Unitedstatians," or, as a fellow-countryman who has lived 
so long among them as to admit their contention always writes it, 
" Usians." 

What we need in such jobs as that in Santo Domingo are " long time 
men," soldiers who have learned by experience that the task is rather 
one of education than of oppression. I should like to see all those 
removed from our forces of occupation who have not a proper respect 
for Dominicans; not an unbounded respect — I haven't that myself — 
but who at least admit that our wards are human beings, with their 
own rights and customs, and not merely " Spigs " and " niggers." 
There is too much of that " nigger " attitude among the more ignorant 
class of Americans, who too often make the color-line a protection 
against their own shortcomings. 

" Mac " — or " Big George," for that matter — is an excellent ex- 
ample of the kind of American we want in such places. An early 
training that has taught self-control as well as the power to command, 
a long enough residence to speak Spanish perfectly, with all its local 
idioms, a bit of Irish blarney, which goes a long way with these simple 
and really good-hearted people, a due knowledge and regard for their 
customs and point of view, yet with a sense of humor to see and 
enjoy, rather than be annoyed by, their ridiculous side — in short, a 
real American, by which I do not mean the boisterous, bullying fellow 
who sees no good outside the United States, but one who can adapt 
himself to all conditions, return courtesy for courtesy, concise and 
straight-forward, living up to the law in every particular, always giving 
common sense the right of way over red tape, kindly worded in all his 
dealings, yet always letting possible recalcitrants sense the revolver 
loaded and cocked under his — the government's — coat. Such are the 
men needed for these jobs, not the haughty autocrat nor the ignorant 
*" rough-neck." 

The majority of Dominicans object to American occupation for sev- 
eral reasons. A list of the most potent might run something as follows : 
That of the bad boy made to behave himself ; the resentment of 
politicians who have lost their hold on the public purse ; the knowledge 



2 4 o ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

that the Americans consider themselves a superior race; the sharpness 
of the American color-line ; the military censorship ; " unconstitutional " 
American military courts ; the order against carrying arms ; the alleged 
breaking by the government of occupation of the Dominican law re- 
stricting immigration. There are others, but they are unimportant as 
compared to these. 

The first two or three need no explanation. Few Americans realize 
how irksome is our attitude on the negro question in a country where 
not one inhabitant in ten can show an unquestionable Caucasian pedi- 
gree. Even the Dominicans have a color-line; I have yet to find a 
country inhabited by negroes that has not; but they see no justice in 
ranking a well-educated, influential citizen of more than the American 
average of culture in the same socially impossible category as an illit- 
erate black dock laborer, simply because his hair is curly and his com- 
plexion slightly dulled. As to the censorship, the occupation calls it 
excessively lenient ; Dominican writers find it " intolerable." That it is 
stupid goes without saying; it seems to be a universal rule that a censor 
must be supremely ignorant of literature and forbidden even to have a 
speaking acquaintance with the classics. Yet with an uninstructed, 
inflammable population and a pest of irresponsible, self-seeking scrib- 
blers, no military occupation could exist without taking measures to 
curtail printed sedition. This is a rock on which the rather popular 
military governor and even the best class of natives have split asunder. 
The Comision Consultiva, headed by the Archbishop, that was formed 
to give the admiral unofficial advice on Dominican matters beyond his 
natural ken, resigned at the beginning of 1920 because the " insupport- 
able " censorship was not wholly abolished, instead of being merely 
softened. 

The Cortes Prcbostales come in for a large share of Dominican 
invective. The American military courts, they protest, sometimes try 
and punish those who have been acquitted by the native courts, and vice 
versa. It is unconstitutional, they cry. True enough, but so is it un- 
constitutional to have made it necessary for a foreign military force 
to assume the government of the country. Courts martial are resorted 
to only in cases of carrying arms, insurrections, assaults on members 
of the forces of occupation, and sales of liquor to men in uniform. It 
takes no great amount of thinking to see how impossible it would be 
to have such matters passed upon by Dominican judges. For one thing, 
none of them are covered by the civil laws of Santo Domingo. 

It is naturally irksome to a man who has always considered a revolver 




p. 

3 >• 



E 
o 

p 



c 
E o 

I* 





The tomb of Columbus in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo City 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 241 

as a sign of caste, an adornment similar to a diamond ring or a gold- 
headed cane, to be forced to dispense with this portion of his attire. 
But not much can be said for the plaintiff in this case. There is more 
reason for sympathy with the countrymen who cannot even have a 
shotgun to kill the crows, woodpeckers, guinea-fowls, and parrots that 
destroy his crops. The man, too, is entitled to a hearing who has 
hundreds of laborers under his command in the wilder sections of the 
country, or who lives on the edge of the bandit zone, yet who can have 
nothing better than a machete with which to protect himself or his 
family. Our experience of the close resemblance between gavillcros 
and respectable citizens, however, has sadly shattered our confidence, 
and it is difficult even for native officials whose duties carry them about 
the country to get permission to dress themselves up in firearms. 

I have already spoken of the dog-in-the-manger attitude of the 
Dominicans on the subject of immigration. Their complaints on this 
score have become less acute since the military government promulgated 
the recent decree of registration and proof of self-support for alien 
laborers. There is still some grumbling, however. Native law forbids 
the bringing in of negro or Oriental workmen " except in cases of 
emergency." The Americans, they assert, have permitted too many 
blacks from the neighboring islands to take employment in the great 
cane-fields of the South. Yet surely the harvesting of sugar is an 
" emergency " to the unsweetened world of to-day. Also, the Ameri- 
can steamship line that monopolizes the carrying of goods to and from 
Santo Domingo brings stevedores from Turk's Island and other points 
to work the cargoes, dropping them again at their homes, and the 
Dominicans complain that this lowers their standard of living. The 
fact is that the native laborers are not merely indolent ; they are dis- 
tressingly independent. About Thursday a bunch of them get together 
and say, " We have enough to live on until Tuesday. Why should 
we work ? " So off goes the bunch on a dance-fiesta-cockfight spree 
and the canes wither in the field or cargoes lie untouched in the hold 
or on the dock. The workmen of the South, in particular, have the 
reputation of being the best time-killers in the world. The great sugar 
centrals of that region could not exist without the privilege of bringing 
in Haitian or British West Indian laborers. 

Abhorring steady labor as he does, the Dominican has been quick 
to catch the drift of modern trade unionism in demanding exorbitant 
wages for indifferent work. At the recent labor conference in Wash- 
ington Santo Domingo was represented by the mulatto son of a German, 



242 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

formerly governor of Puerto Plata, and a man who could not but have 
chuckled at his own humor in addressing the conference as " my fellow 
workmen." Denied the privilege of holding office in the old style under 
American rule, these professional politicians are attempting to get a 
strangle-hold on the public purse by forming labor unions and appealing 
to the American Federation of Labor to bring its powerful influence 
to bear on the military government. The parade of a score of gremios 
during our stay in the Dominican capital, nearly all of them formed 
within six months, shows what success is attending their efforts. The 
labor dictator of America seems to have fallen into the trap. He re- 
quests that the laborers of Santo Domingo be given " full liberty of 
action," which sounds to those of us who have been there like permis- 
sion to take a gun and turn bandit. Measured in dollars and cents 
the wages of the Dominican laborer are not high ; balanced against the 
work he actually accomplishes they show him rather the exploiter than 
the victim. No one on earth, least of all the occupation, is hindering 
him from doing a good day's work and getting reasonably well paid for 
it — except his own indolence, which in the end is apt 'to leave him 
swamped beneath foreign immigration in spite of any political manipu- 
lations. 

Among those I talked with about their country's " wrongs " was 
Decjderio Arias, the former war minister who added the last straw to 
American patience. He runs a pathetic little cigar factory in Santiago 
now, sleeping on a cot in one corner of it, and professes, I hesitate to 
report, a great friendship for " Big George." A proud, rather ignorant 
mulatto, with perhaps a touch of Indian blood, a commanding manner 
still despite his reverses and the high degree of outward courtesy of 
all his people, he is, or pretends to be, fairly well satisfied with American 
occupation. All he wanted, he asserts, was internal peace for his 
beloved native land, and the marines have brought that, or nearly so, 
But he regrets that the Americans do not study the customs and 
" psycholology " of the Dominican people, rather than jumping to the 
conclusion that what, is good for themselves is unquestionably good for 
all other races. 

Then there was Santo Domingo's chief novelist and literary light, the 
pride of La Vega. He is perhaps the most outspoken opponent of the 
occupation in the country. " Cuba and Porto Rico have always been 
colonies," he frothed, " and are used to having a rule of force thrust 
upon them. But Santo Domingo won her own independence single- 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 243 

handed and what we want, what we must have, is LIBERTY! " He 
did not add that the meaning of the word in this particular case was the 
right of continual revolution, but it was easy to supply that footnote for 
him. His wrath was scornful toward those of his fellow-countrymen 
who had " debased themselves " to accept office under the occupation, 
and he asserted that all who had done so were " the dregs of our national 
life." The novelist's testimony was somewhat discounted, however, 
by " Mac's " characterization of him as a " one-cylinder crook," who 
had been removed from public office for selling cancelled revenue 
stamps. 

The parish priest of Seibo was far more favorable to the occupation. 
A native Dominican, without a hint of the asceticism of the French 
priests in Haiti, with a generous waist-line and the face of one who 
enjoys to the full all the good things of life, he had the ripe judgment 
of a man of the world, rather than the view-point of the cloister. 
All intellectual Dominicans, he explained, are ashamed that it was 
necessary, yet they know it is for their own good, that the Ameri- 
cans have " annexed " the country. The lesson has been hard to 
bear, but it was unavoidable, and now they have learned it so well 
that they " will never do it again " — it sounded like the cry of a bad 
boy under the paternal strap — if only we will let them govern them- 
selves and still hold a menacing hand over them. It is the old Latin- 
American cry for protection without responsibility. Every Dominican 
would bless the United States if the marines were withdrawn and an 
advisory governor left. They would never again steal public office or 
government funds. They have been taught that continual revolutions 
are not a mere pastime, but a crime. The intellectual Americans of the 
occupation had done much good, he asserted, but their works had been 
largely offset by those of the other class. For all the violence he had 
reported, he seemed to have no hard feelings against us, but he felt 
that the time had come for us to go away. He " had heard it said " 
that the gavilleros would return to their canucos and settle down again 
as soon as the Americans leave. Many of them were simple rascals 
who had no sense of patriotism whatever, but only a desire to live by 
robbery and plunder. They were as apt to kill their own countrymen 
as Americans, rather more so, in fact, for the latter went armed and 
the Dominicans could not. Yet many of them had been driven to the 
hills by force of circumstances — by threats from the real bandits, 
by the marines mistaking an innocent family for gavillero sympathizers, 
or a man was falsely given a bad name and dared not come in and give 



244 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

himself up, for fear of suffering the fate of Vicentico. Once these 
unwilling outlaws abandoned the fight the rest would have no choice 
but to disband. 

It is difficult to admit, however, that Santo Domingo is now ready 
to govern itself, not because there are no educated and honest men 
in the country, but because these cannot get into power. Force rules ; 
just elections are impossible. As in all Latin-America, with few 
exceptions, parties depend upon and take the name of their leader. 
Principles do not interest the rank and file in the least. In the old 
days the president always appointed a military man as provincial leader, 
that his " party " might not assert any signs of independence. Every 
district had its little local cacique, or tribal chief. Elections were two- 
day affairs. Woolly countrymen were brought in from the hills and 
voted at once. The cacique got them shaved and voted them again ; got 
them a hair-cut and voted them again ; gave them a new shirt and voted 
them again. On the second day a half-dozen more disguises preceded 
their repeated visits to the polls. It is hard to believe that a bare four 
years of occupation have completely cured the Dominicans of such 
habits. The Americans, in fact, have never yet attempted to hold an 
election, hence there has been no new ideal held up to them in this 
matter. Under the old regime judges divided fines among themselves, 
and it cost much effort to get them to give up this privilege. Now 
they are apt to give ludicrously light fines, because it all goes to the 
internal revenue, in which they are not personally interested. Like a 
wayward boy who was never taught to govern himself, but was merely 
exploited by a heartless stepfather, from whom he finally ran away, 
Santo Domingo has no real conception of how to conduct itself in 
political matters, and up to the present occupation no one has ever 
attempted to teach it what it never learned from Spain or experience. 

Some Dominicans would be satisfied with an American protectorate, 
provided they could have their own congress and a certain show of 
autonomy. Many thoughtful citizens want us to remain until a new 
generation has been trained to administer their affairs. So far little 
such training has been done, and it will take a long time to break them 
of their " Spig " habits. Cuba and Porto Rico have always been used 
to obeying the law, yet they have scarcely yet approached proper self- 
government. Santo Domingo has always run more or less wild ; she 
needs a complete new standard of honor and morals. Among other 
things this will require at least twenty-five years of good elementary 
schooling. Nor should it be a hesitant, over-kindly schooling. The 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 245 

text-books adopted should contain such pertinent queries as : " What 
are the chief faults of Dominicans (of Latin-Americans in general) 
which it is necessary to correct before they can take their proper place 
in the modern world? Answer: We must get rid of Caudillismo, of 
personal instead of political parties " — and so on, with what may seem 
offensive frankness. Not only should Americans remain long enough 
in Santo Domingo to train a new generation, but we should tell them 
at once that such is our firm intention. The rumor that our troops 
are about to be withdrawn is always going around the country, leaving 
no one a certain peg on which to hang his hat. Remember how we 
hate the uncertainty of a presidential year. There should be a procla- 
mation by our own federal government to the effect that we are going 
to remain for many years — I should say fifty, until all the present 
generation has disappeared — and that there is no use kicking mean- 
while against the inevitable. Instead of that the present governor 
tells them that he will do all in his power to get them a civil government 
soon and to have the troops withdrawn, remaining perhaps as a civil 
governor. I do not believe they are ready for any such move, certainly 
not to handle their own finances, which is what they wish above all to 
do. Bit by bit they should be initiated into the mysteries of real self- 
government, but we should avoid the error we made in Cuba, and to 
some extent in Porto Rico, of graduating them before they have finished 
the grammar grades. If the unborn generation can be reared without 
political pollution from the living, there is promise even in such a race 
as the Dominican. However, have you ever set out on a journey 
astride a mongrel native horse and expected him to keep up with a 
thoroughbred ? 

The military occupation has made mistakes ; all military governments 
do. But they are by no means so many nor so serious as those the 
Dominicans made themselves. There have been cases of arbitrariness, 
snap judgments, and injustice, but on the whole American rule is just, 
justifiable, and well done. Some of the trouble comes from the fact 
that navy youths of no experience are given important secretarias that 
require men of exceedingly mature judgment — though, to be sure, the 
governing of Santo Domingo, with its bare 750,000 inhabitants, is little 
more than a mayor's job, except in extent of territory. A second 
drawback is that the most important posts are in the hands of men 
who know not a word of Spanish and must do all their work through 
interpreters, usually of the politician stripe, with results easily imagined. 



246 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

There is no reason whatever why graduates of Annapolis or West Point 
should not know what has become so important a language to their 
calling. Did anyone ever hear of a German professional officer who 
did not speak at least English and French fluently? Some of the time 
that is now given to " social functions " and the learning of afternoon- 
tea manners could easily be sacrificed to our new requirements. Lastly, 
there should be more knowledge and interest in our scattered wards 
among our higher officials at home. It is not particularly helpful to a 
naval officer suddenly appointed governor of such a place as Santo 
Domingo to have the secretary who should outline his policy turn from 
the map on which he has just looked up that unknown spot and make 
some such reply as, " Orders ? Don't bother me with details. I have 
more important matters requiring my attention. Go down there and 
sit on the lid." 

As an example of the improvements already accomplished by the 
occupation there is the matter of marriage. Formerly it was almost 
impossible for the mass of the people to form legal unions; the cost 
was too great and the requirements of birth certificates and other 
formalities insurmountable. As a result, marriage had come to be 
looked upon as a superfluous ceremony. This condition, more or less 
universal throughout the West Indies, is a deliberate legacy of olden 
times. The exploiters of the islands, particularly the Spaniards, 
abetted by the church, whose prosperity depended on their prosperity, 
purposely made marriage difficult among the laboring classes. A mar- 
ried woman and her children could demand support from her husband ; 
a mere consort added to the available labor supply, because she was 
obliged to earn her livelihood in the fields and to send her children 
there early in life. Though there were men who treated their irregular 
families as legal dependents before the Americans came, illegitimate 
children were frequently abandoned, mistreated, or exploited to a 
degree that drove many of them to turn bandit. At best they suffered 
for want of a firm fatherly hand in their early years. The occupation 
attacked this problem by forcing men to pay for the support and school- 
ing of their " outside " children. As little stigma attaches to this 
social misbehavior in Santo Domingo, there was seldom any difficulty 
in establishing the parentage. It was usually common knowledge. 
Even the priests have families in the majority of cases, many of them 
frankly acknowledging their sons and daughters. There are men in 
Santo Domingo, some of them veritable pillars of society, who suddenly 
saw their burdens increased from two or three children to twenty-five 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 247 

under the new law. Marriages are now free, and are public ceremonies. 
They almost always take place at night, and crowds gather outside the 
wide-open, lighted house. Members of the family come out and talk 
with friends in the throng now and then but do not invite them inside. 
About the parlor table sit the bride and groom, the notary and the priest, 
surrounded by the standing relatives and intimate amigos and com- 
padres. There is much signing of documents and ledgers, each fol- 
lowed by a sort of rapturous sigh from the curious throng in the street, 
which under no circumstances short of a downpour gives any signs of 
breaking up until the new couple has retired from the scene. Most 
dances, fiestas, and family celebrations are like that in Santo Domingo, 
where the principal room always faces the street and the heat makes 
closed doors and windows worse than superfluous. Sometimes these 
open, chair-forested parlors are on a level with the sidewalk, some- 
times several feet below it, but it is impossible to avoid a peep inside, 
even if one does not join the crowd. Besides, there is nothing secretive 
about such Dominican festivities ; the bride who did not see a throng 
gathered before her door on her wedding night would probably weep 
her eyes out before morning. 

When the Americans arrived there were only 18,000 pupils nominally 
attending the schools of Santo Domingo. There were no rural schools 
whatever. Many " teachers " never taught at all, but were merely 
political henchmen who drew salaries, some of them wholly illiterate. 
Some of them farmed their " pupils " out or worked them in their 
own fields. Superintendents and inspectors rarely did either, and 
kept no records whatever. Listen to a passage from a novel by a 
sworn enemy of the occupation: 

The average Dominican woman frequented — the word is well chosen — a 
school of first letters sustained and directed by a priest, where she learned to 
read and write after a fashion, the barest rudiments of arithmetic and geog- 
raphy, and a world of prayers which the good priest made special effort to teach 
her. She had the catechism at her fingers' ends, but except for the forms of 
devotion she was a complete ignoramus who took seriously any nonsense told 
her by those who happened, falsely or otherwise, to have her confidence. 

There was not even a basis on which to build an educational system. 
Those charged with the task had to begin from the ground up. The 
peculiar status of Santo Domingo gives it an American Minister of 
Public Instruction and a native superintendent, the reverse of the case 
in Haiti. Both are earnest men, but pedagogy is not on the curriculum 
at Annapolis. No attempt has been made to Americanize the schools, 



248 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

as in Porto Rico and the Philippines, which is proper enough politically 
but questionable educationally. Every man has been made personally 
responsible for the men under him, clear down through the system. 
The occupation now has 100,000 pupils in the schools, with as many 
still unprovided for ; but many of the former attend only half time for 
lack of accommodations. Dominican illiteracy still exceeds ninety per 
cent., and information passes chiefly by word of mouth, with consequent 
garbling. An attempt is being made to have the university in the 
capital teach only " practical " subjects, banishing the lofty culture with 
which the Latin-American loves to flirt. One gets the impression, 
however, that there is more attention and expense bestowed upon the 
elaborate educational pamphlets that pour in a constant stream from 
the government presses than on the adobe school houses and the bare- 
foot urchins who attend them. 

The Dominican of the masses is kindly, hospitable, long-suffering, 
and hopeful ; in spite of having been exploited and mistreated for 
centuries, despite his tendency to settle things by force of arms and 
his low value on human life, he is still simple and good-hearted under- 
neath. Even in the days of revolution lone Americans went in safety 
where a company of marines now moves with caution. The mothers 
of American girls married to officers of the occupation would be horri- 
fied to know that their daughters use murderers from the Guardia 
prisons as cooks and servants, yet such arrangements scarcely attract 
a passing comment among the Americans in Santo Domingo. Like 
all Latin-Americans, the dominicano has no compassion, either for 
animals or his fellow-men. Brave enough in physical combat, he has 
little moral courage — I have already mentioned the inability of native 
officials to discipline their own people. Worst of all, he has no idea 
how to curb his politicians. The best families emigrated to Cuba 
during the twenty-two years of Haitian rule, and the latter closed the 
university and many of the schools as superfluous luxuries, which may 
be among the reasons why the " higher " classes do not measure up cor- 
respondingly in character with the masses. A rise in the social scale 
seems frequently to bring a drop in moral standards. As an example : 
The son of a shoemaker worked his way through school with truly 
American spirit ; he studied medicine in Paris, learned English and 
French, is a voracious reader of all the literature of his profession in 
several languages. Yet when a poor countryman with a broken skull 
was brought in to him by a Guardia detachment, he declined to attend 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 249 

him, after beginning the operation, because no one could assure him 
his $500 fee. 

The Dominicans have few strictly native customs, their chief charac- 
teristic being their fondness for revolutions. They are gay, vivacious, 
and frivolous, fond of music and dancing, and find a great deal of 
amusement in the most trivial pastimes. Bull-fights have long since 
disappeared, but cock-fighting is the universal male sport, and on Sun- 
days and feast days the cockpit is the center of attraction. Not a city 
or village is without its gallcra ; in the country districts there is sure to 
be one within easy distance of every collection of thatched huts. On 
any holiday the traveler along the principal roads and highways is 
certain to meet a cavalcade of horsemen, each carefully carrying in a 
sack what the initiated know to be a prize rooster. 

The chief gallcra of Santo Domingo City was just back of our 
lodging. On Sunday we were awakened at dawn by its uproar, which 
varied in volume but never once ceased entirely until sunset. In the 
afternoon I wandered into the enclosure ; paid an admission fee of 
twenty-five cents, and, climbing the tank-like outer wall, crowded into 
a place up near the round sheet-iron roof. The sport is legalized and 
a part of the gate-money goes to the municipality, netting some $1,500 
a year. This is a mere bagatelle, however, compared to the sums that 
change hands among the spectators during a single day's sport. Like 
most Spanish games, betting is the chief raison d'etre of the cock-fight. 
The constant, deafening hubbub recalled the curb market of New York, 
as well £?s the ball games of Havana. Before each separate contest 
there were long waits while the shrieking spectators placed their wagers 
on the two haughty, gorgeous birds tenderly held by their owners or 
hired seconds. 

It came as a surprise to find what class of men attend these con- 
tests in the capital. The circle of faces rising eight tiers high above 
the earth-floored pit were in many cases wholly free from negro strain ; 
the great majority of the audience was not merely well-dressed, they 
showed considerable evidence of moderate affluence. Wealthy mer- 
chants and men high in local affairs, two or three ex-ministers, were 
pointed out to me as owners of one or several contending cocks. 
" Chickens " would be a more exact term, for the fighters, unlike the 
spectators, were not confined to one sex. The toilettes of the birds 
were fantastic in the extreme — each had been clipped, picked, or other- 



250 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

wise denuded of its feathers on various parts of the body, particularly 
the thighs and neck, according to the whim or expert opinion of its 
trainer, and the appearance of its bare skin demonstrated that it was 
indeed in the " pink " of condition. An invariable formality preceded 
each contest. On a square board hanging stiffly on poles from the 
roof was placed a pair of scales in which the two opponents were 
weighed in their sacks, custom requiring that they balance one another 
to the fraction of an ounce. Then, when a lull in the betting showed 
that the spectators had decided their odds, the owner or his agent 
filled his mouth with rum and water and spurted it in a fine spray over 
the bird from haughty head to bare legs, and the fight was on. 

The first battle after my arrival was between a black hen and a red 
India rooster. From the moment of release they went straight at it, 
like professional boxers. Now and then they clinched, but as there 
was no referee to separate them they eventually broke away them- 
selves. Then the rooster took to running round and round the ring, 
the hen after him, which a " fan " beside me called clever strategy. 
During the early part of the fight the favorite changed with every peck, 
or slash of the spurs. Shouts loud as those at a Thanksgiving football 
game seemed to set the tin roof above us to vibrating. The shrieks of 
the bettors were emphasized by waving hands, by jumping up and down, 
by shaking money in one another's faces and placing wagers at a dis- 
tance by lightning-quick, cabalistic gestures. Those who hazarded a 
mere ten dollars a " throw " were the most insignificant of " pikers " ; 
on every side flashed hundred-dollar bills, sometimes two or three of 
them in the same hand. Screams of ecstasy greeted each clever spur- 
stroke, awakening a loathsome disgust for one's fellow-men. I found 
myself wondering how many of these shrieking fanaticos had a tenth 
as much nerve as their gamey chickens. Certainly none of them would 
have endured so much punishment without crying quits. Gradually 
the bets dropped from even to ten to one. The rooster was getting the 
worst of it. He had gone stone blind, his head was a mass of blood, 
he was so groggy on his feet that he fell dizzily on his side now and 
then, only to struggle up again and fight on, pecking the air at random 
while his opponent continued a grueling punishment. The owner on 
the side lines kept shouting frantic advice to him, — " Anda, cobardc! 
Pica, gallo ! " A lucky peck or spur-thrust sometimes suddenly gives 
the battle even to a blind cock, hence there was still hope. Toward 
the end the rooster frequently lay down from sheer fatigue, his oppo- 
nent respecting his fallen condition with knightly honor and never once 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 251 

touching him until he had wabbled to his feet again. The exhibition 
became monotonously disgusting, even some of the " fans " began to 
protest, and at length the owner stepped into the pit with a deprecating 
shrug of the shoulders and snatched up the rooster, rudely, in one hand, 
like some carrion crow. His bleeding head hung as if he were dead. 
Even when a gamecock wins, it cannot fight again for months; if it 
loses it means the garbage heap or at best some pauper's pot. A man 
at the ringside pulled the natural spurs off the defeated bird for use 
on some other less well-armed fowl, losing bettors began to hunt up 
the winners and pay their debts, and another throng invaded the ring 
in preparation for the next disgusting contest. 

Santo Domingo City, more often called " La Capital " within the 
country, is a prettier town than Santiago, and somewhat larger. It 
is less compact, has more trees and open spaces, and many curious old 
ruins, — palaces, gates, fortresses, and churches — so many old 
churches, in fact, that some of them are now used as theaters and 
government offices. Of the several ancient stone gateways remaining 
from its former city wall the most curious is the " Puerta de la Inde- 
pendencia," opening on a pretty outer plaza — curious because the 
Dominicans pretend it is the gate through which the triumphant army 
entered after driving out the Haitians in 1844, though any street urchin 
knows the entry was really made by a less ornate gate nearer the sea. 
Then there is the aged tree down in the custom house compound on 
the banks of the Ozama river to which Columbus is said to have tied 
one of his ships. The cathedral on the central plaza is a picturesque 
pile of old stone, without tower or spire, and noteworthy for the 
elaborate tomb of the famous Genoese just inside its main portal. 
Without going into the vexed question of whether the bones it contains 
are really those of the great discoverer, except to say that Havana, 
Valladolid, Seville, and Santo Domingo City are all equally certain 
that they have the genuine remains, one can at least say that the tomb 
itself is worth visiting. Indeed, though a trifle ornate for American 
tastes, it is astonishingly artistic to the traveler long familiar with the 
almost universally ludicrous " art " of Latin-American churches. With 
its splendid bronze reliefs, its excellent small figures in marble, and its 
inspiring general form, it might almost rank as the gem of ecclesiastical 
architecture south of the Rio Grande. 

Once in the cathedral there are several other things worth a glance 
before leaving, though its tiny windows give the interior an eternal 



252 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

twilight. Two or three paintings by Velasquez and Murillo have a 
genuine value ; a picture brought over by Columbus can be seen only 
by means of the sexton's key ; a cross which the discoverer of America 
is said to have set up nearby is protected by glass doors let into the wall 
because the faithful and the curious were given to chipping off pieces 
as sacred relics or souvenirs. The mahogany choir-stalls, the pulpits, 
and the altars are all of rich-red old woodwork. There is an excellent 
tomb of the archbishop who was once president. Indeed, it does not 
seem necessary to be of Columbian stature to be able to sleep one's 
last sleep beside the doughty old navigator. During our stay in the 
city the marble floor was opened a few feet from the historic tomb to 
receive the remains of a Syrian merchant, long resident in " La Capital " 
but deceased in New York, whose only claim to glory seemed to be a 
fortune easily won and wisely spent. The interior of the cathedral has 
been generously*" restored " by daubing the walls with gleaming white. 
It was planned to whitewash the aged outer walls also, but the Pope 
vetoed the suggestion, for which the Dominicans seem to have a griev- 
ance against him. 

The government palace, occupied now by Americans in navy and 
marine uniforms, is full of capacious leather-upholstered chairs, in 
striking contrast to the average uncomfortable Dominican seat. No 
wonder they fought one another to become president. Ostentation is 
more important than real use among the two score or more automobiles 
with wire wheels and luxurious tonneaux that hover about the central 
plaza, though there are good macadam roads for 16, 25, and 30 kilo- 
meters respectively in as many directions. The theaters are seldom 
occupied by actors in the flesh, though now and then there is a bit of 
opera. The only regular attractions are the movies, which begin at 
nine in theory, nearer ten in practice, and feature the same curly- 
haired heroes and vapid- faced heroines that nightly decorate the screens 
in the United States. Like all Latin-Americans, the people of " La 
Capital " are great lovers of noise. Despite American rule the crack- 
voiced church bells begin their constant din long before dawn. During 
the " flu " epidemic, with its endless succession of funerals, they 
thumped for nine mortal days without a pause, until the marine doctors 
protested that most of the victims were dying for lack of sleep. Auto- 
mobiles scorn to use mufflers; carriages are constantly jangling their 
bells. Every boy in town is an expert whistler, and every passer-by 
will find some way of making a noise if he has to invent it. The 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 253 

throngs returning- from the cinemas habitually make slumber impos- 
sible until after midnight. One comes to wonder if it is not this 
constant lack of sleep that makes the Dominicans so nervous, inatten- 
tive, and racially inefficient. 

Small as it looks on the map it is not a simple matter to cover all 
Santo Domingo in a few weeks. Among the parts we missed were the 
south-western provinces, including the town of Azua, seventy miles 
from the capital, founded in 1504 by Don Diego Velazquez, who later 
conquered and settled Cuba. Thereabouts once dwelt many illustrious 
sons of old Spain, among them Cortes, the conqueror of Mexico, 
Pizarro, who subjugated Peru, and Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. 
A much shorter route from Port au Prince to the Dominican capital 
is that through this region, but it is chiefly by water. Lake Azua, 
partly in Haiti, is fifty-six feet above sea-level, and a paradise for duck- 
hunters. Lake Enriquillo, only five miles east of the other, and named 
for the last Indian chief who opposed the Spaniards, is a hundred feet 
belozv the sea and more salty than the ocean itself. Nor should the 
traveler to whom time is unlimited fail to visit the high mountain 
ranges in the center of the country, with their break-neck trails and 
luxuriant vegetation. 

One of the drawbacks of West Indian travel is the lack of shipping 
between the islands, particularly the larger ones. Only in the ports 
themselves can one get the slightest data on sailings, and often not even 
there. This is especially true of Santo Domingo, one of whose chief 
misfortunes is the American line that holds a virtual monopoly of its 
sea-going traffic. Not only are its freight and passenger rates exorbi- 
tant, its treatment of travelers and shippers worse than autocratic, 
and some of its steamers so decrepit that they take twenty-six days 
for the run down from New York, halting every few hours to pump 
out the vessel or patch something or other essential to her safety, 
but it keeps a throttle hold on poor Santo Domingo by more or less 
questionable means. Not long ago another line proposed to establish 
traffic between the island and New Orleans. One of its steamers put 
into a Dominican port, offering to take cargo at reasonable rates. 
Though the warehouses along the wharves were piled high with cacao, 
not a bag was turned over to the newcomer. Her captain button-holed 
a shipper and asked for an explanation. 

" It 's like this," whispered the latter, " we should like to give you 



254 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

our cargo, but if we do, the other line will leave our in-coming goods, 
on which we are absolutely dependent, lying on the dock in New York 
until they rot." 

The captain visited several other ports of the republic, with the same 
result, and the proposed line to New Orleans died for lack of nourish- 
ment. Disgruntled natives assert that the monopoly keeps its hold 
because it has a large fund with which to starve out competitors, and 
because its president is a member of our Shipping Board. The Domini- 
cans, however, are losing patience, and there are signs that the freight 
that should go in American bottoms will gradually go to British, Dutch, 
and later to German steamers. 

We were spared all this through the kindness of the military gover- 
nor, who sent us to La Romana on a submarine chaser. Lest some 
reader be subject to seasickness by suggestion, I shall not say a word 
about the ability of these otherwise staunch little craft to cut incredible 
acrobatic capers on a barely rippling sea. The fact that we noted the 
gaunt old American battleship Memphis still sitting bolt upright on 
the rocks beside the seaside promenade of the capital just where a wave 
tossed her in September, 1916, the dangerous bottle entrance to the 
harbor of San Pedro de Macoris, with its wrecked schooner, and the 
water that spouted a hundred feet into the air through the coral holes 
along the low rocky coast and hung like mist for minutes before it fell, 
must be accepted as proof that we are experienced sailors. At length 
appeared the red roofs of La Romana, with its narrow river harbor, 
similar to that of the capital, and the Santo Domingo we knew was for- 
ever left behind. 

Though it is in Dominican territory, La Romana is virtually Ameri- 
can, a vast estate belonging to a great sugar company of Porto Rico. 
Thanks largely to it, sugar is the chief product of Santo Domingo. 
Here again was one of the huge centrals with which we had grown 
so familiar in Cuba, with its big-business atmosphere, its long rows of 
excellent dwellings built of light coral rock along the edge of the jagged 
coast, its own stores, clubs, movies, and its many miles of standard- 
gauge railroad. We rode about this all the next morning, past immense 
stretches of cane, most of it recently cut, through bateys of white 
wooden huts raised on stilts, sidetracked now and again by long trains 
of cane, hungry bees hovering about them, and finally out upon great 
tracts where the company is pushing back the forests and the bandits 
to make way for increased sugar production. La Romana embraces 
a quarter million acres, of which only 16,000 are under cane, immense 



SANTO DOMINGO UNDER AMERICAN RULE 255 

as the fields already look. Three fourths of the estate is estimated 
good cane land, and the foothills make excellent pasture as fast as they 
are cleared. The felling of these great forests, with what would seem 
to the uninformed a wanton waste of lumber, has already altered the 
rainfall of the region. Formerly the rains were regular; this year not 
a drop fell in January, yet during the forty-eight hours of our visit in 
early February, the gauges registered more than five inches. The 
country women were everywhere paddling about under strips of yagna 
ir lieu of umbrellas. 

The company employs from 7500 to 9000 men, of whom a bare hun- 
dred are Americans, most of them dwelling in the great central batey. 
The rest are chiefly Haitians and Porto Ricans, with a large sprinkling 
of negroes from all the other West Indian islands. English, Porto 
Rican, and Dominican schools are maintained, the teachers of the two 
former being paid out of company funds. There are very few Domini- 
can employees, the natives, though good ax-men, being usually " too 
Castilian to work for a living." Wages range from an average of $1.20 
a day for cane-cutters to $4 for mechanics, with twelve-hour shifts 
and a twenty per cent, bonus for all. The contrast between this pro- 
ductive region and the great virgin wilderness of most of Santo Do- 
mingo gave serious meaning to the parting words of the company 
punster, " What the Dominicans need most is to stop raising Cain and 
go to raising cane." 

W r e left La Romana and Santo Domingo on one of the two cane 
boats that ply nightly between this dependency and the mother country. 
She was the flat-bottomed steamer Glencadam from the Great Lakes, 
flying the British flag and captained by a quaint old Scotchman whose 
cabin far forward contained almost transatlantic accommodations. 
Once more I draw the curtain, however, on the merely personal matters 
of pitch and roll, greatly abetted in this case by the recent rains, which 
had made it impossible to gather more than half a cargo. The very 
canes themselves were showing a tendency to waltz before we had 
passed the mouth of the river and turned our nose toward Porto Rico, 
already lying cloud-like and phantasmal on the eastern horizon. 



CHAPTER XI 

OUR PORTO RICO 

,f "W* """IT "THEN the queen asked for a description of the island," says 
% /\ I an old chronicle, " Columbus crumpled up a sheet of paper 
▼ T and, tossing it upon the table, cried, ' It looks just like that, 
your Majesty ! ' " 

If we are to believe more modern documents, the intrepid Genoese 
made that his stock illustration for most of the islands he discovered. 
Even the firm head of Isabela must have wobbled under its crown 
as one after another of the misnamed "West Indies" were pictured 
to her in the same concise fashion, and brushed off into the regal waste- 
basket. Fortunately, paper was cheaper in those days. Or was it? 
Perhaps it was the wrath born of seeing her last precious sheet turned 
into an island that soured the queen's gratitude, and brought the doughty 
discoverer to dungeons and disgrace. 

Questions of wanton waste aside, there could be no more exact 
description of Porto Rico. The ancient jest about quadrupling the 
area of a land by flattening it out all but loses its facetiousness when 
applied to our main West Indian colony. Barely a hundred miles 
long and forty wide, a celestial rolling-pin would give old Borinquen 
almost the vast extent of Santo Domingo. Its unbrokenly mountain- 
ous character makes any detailed description of its scenic beauties a 
waste of effort ; it could be little more than a constant series of exclama- 
tions of delight. 

For all its ruggedness, it is as easy to get about the island as it is 
difficult to cover the larger one to the westward. There is not a spot 
that cannot be reached from any other point between sunrise and sun- 
set. A railroad encircles the western two thirds of the island, with 
trains by night as well as by day. When the Americans came, they 
found a splendidly engineered military road from coast to coast, with 
branches in several directions. If this sounds strange of a Spanish 
country, it must be accounted for not by civic pride or necessity, but in 
the vain hope of defending the island from armed invasion. To-day 
there are hundreds of miles of excellent highway covering Porto Rico 

256 




Ponce de Leon's palace now flies the Stars and Stripes 




Thousands of women work in the fields in Porto Rico 







< 




c 
a 



a 



OUR PORTO RICO 257 

. with a network of quick transit that reaches all but the highest peaks of 

/\its central range. It is doubtful whether any state of our union can 

rival this detached bit of American territory in excellence and extent 

of roads, certainly not in the scenic splendor that so generally flanks 

them. 

Automobiles flash constantly along these labyrinthian carretcras, 
many of them bearing the licenses of "the Mainland." If the visitor 
has neglected to include his own car among his baggage and trembles 
at the thought of the truly American bill that awaits the end of a private 
journey, there are always the guaguas, pronounced " wawas " by all 
but those who take Spanish letters at full English value. Scarcely a 
road of Borinquen lacks one or two of the public auto-buses each day 
in either direction, carrying the mails and such travelers as deign to 
mix with the rank and file of their fellow-citizens of Spanish ancestry. 
My tastes no doubt are plebeian, but I for one gladly pass up the 
haughty private conveyance for these rumbling plow-horses of the 
gasolene world. They have all the charm of the old stage-coaches that 
prance through the pages of Dickens, except for the change of horses. 
In them one may strike up conversation with any of the varied types 
of rural Porto Rico, and the halt at each post-office brings little episodes 
that the scurrying private tourist never glimpses. 

" We divide the people of Porto Rico into four categories for pur- 
poses of identification," said the American chief of the Insular Police, 
" according to the shape of their feet. The minority, mostly town- 
dwellers, wear shoes. Of the great mass of countrymen, those with 
broad, flat feet, live in the cane-lands around the coast. The coffee 
men have over-developed big toes, because they use them in climbing 
the steep hillsides from bush to bush. In the tobacco districts, where 
the planting is done with the feet, they are short and stubby. It beats 
the Bertillon system all hollow." 

The man bent on seeing the varying phases of Porto Rican life 
could not do better than adopt the chief's broad divisions of the popu- 
lation; for our over-crowded little Caribbean isle is a complex com- 
munity, as complex in its way as its great stepmother-land, and one 
that defies the pick-things-up-as-you-go method. Small as it is, it con- 
tains a diversity of types that emphasizes the influence of occupation, 
immediate environment, even scenery, on the human family. 

San Juan, the capital — to give the shod minority the precedence — 
is compacted together on a small island of the north coast, attached to 
the rest of the country only by a broad macadam highway along which 



258 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

stream countless automobiles, and strictly modern street-cars and their 
rival auto-buses in constant five-cent procession. It was a century old 
when the Dutch colonized New Amsterdam. Small wonder that it 
looks upon its scurrying fellow-citizens from " los Estados " as par- 
venus. Palaces and fortifications that antedate the building of the 
Mayflozver still tower above the compact, cream-colored mass, most of 
them now housing high officials from the North. Casa Blanca, built 
for Ponce de Leon — the younger, it is true — now resounds to the 
footsteps of the American colonel commanding the Porto Rican regi- 
ment of our regular army. The governor's palace, almost as aged, 
has an underground passage that carried many a mysterious personage 
to and from the outer sea-wall in the old Spanish days, and through 
which more than one American governor is said to have regained his 
quarters at hours and under conditions which caused him to mumble 
blessings on Castilian foresight, though it is hard to give credence to 
this latter tradition, for how could he escape the all-seeing American 
chief of police who occupies the lower story? The Stars and Stripes 
still seem a bit incongruous above the inevitable Morro Castle, while 
the tennis-court in its moat and the golf-links across its grassy parade- 
ground have almost a suggestion of the sacrilegious. Of the cathedral 
with its green plaster covering there is little to be said, except that the 
solemn Spanish dedication over the bones of Ponce de Leon loses some- 
thing of its solemnity in being signed by Archbishop Monsenor Bill 
Jones. The mighty sea-wall that holds the sometimes raging Atlantic 
at bay, and massive San Cristobal fortress at the neck of the town are 
worth coming far to see, but they have that in common with many a 
Spanish-American monument. 

For after all, San Juan is still a son of Spain, despite the patently 
American federal building that contains its post-office and custom- 
house. Its architecture is of the bare, street-toeing fagade, interior- 
patio variety, its sidewalks all but imaginary, its noise unceasing. 
Beautiful as it looks from across the bay, heaped up on its nose of land, 
it has little of the pleasant spaciousness of younger cities, and withal 
no great amount of the Latin charm with which one imbues it from 
afar. Its Americanization consists chiefly of frequent " fuentes de 
soda " in place of its bygone cafes, and a certain reflection of New 
York ways in its larger stores, whose almost invariably male clerks 
sometimes know enough English to nod comprehendingly and bring an 
armful of shirts when one asks for trousers. Something more than 



OUR PORTO RICO 259 

that, of course; its dressier men have discarded their mustaches as a 
sign of their new citizenship, and many a passer-by who knows not a 
word of English has all the outward appearance of a continental 
American. Base-ball, too, has come to stay, though the counter influ- 
ence may be detected in the custom of American schoolmarms of attend- 
ing the bet-curdling horse races in the outskirts of the capital on Sunday 
afternoons. 

The central plaza on a Sunday evening has a few notes of unique- 
ness to the sated Latin-American traveler. It is unusually small, a 
long, narrow rectangle with few trees or benches, cement paved from 
edge to edge, and burdened with the name of " Plaza Baldorioty." The 
Porto Rican seems to like free play in his central squares ; more than 
a few of them have been denuded of the royal palms of olden times, 
and are reduced to the bare hard level of a tennis-court. A few years 
ago a venturesome American Jew conceived the plan of providing 
concert-going San Juan with rocking-chairs in place of the uncomfort- 
able iron sillas that decorate every other Sunday-evening plaza south 
of the Rio Grande. Strangely enough, the innovation took. Now 
one must be an early arrival at the weekly rctreta if he would exchange 
his dime for even the last of the rockers that flank the Plaza Baldorioty 
four rows deep on each side. While the municipal band renders its 
classical program with a moderate degree of skill, all San Juan rocks 
in unison with the leader's baton. All San Juan with the color-line 
drawn, that is ; for whether it is true that the well-groomed insular 
police have secret orders to ask them to move on, or it is merely a time- 
honored custom, black citizens shun the central square on Sunday 
evenings, or at most hang about the outskirts. There is no division of 
sexes, however, another evidence perhaps of American influence. 
Senoritas sometimes good to look at in spite of their heavy coating of 
rice powder trip back and forth beside their visibly enamored swains 
as freely as if the Moorish customs of their neighboring cousins had 
long since been forgotten. For the time-honored promenade has not 
succumbed to the rocking-chair. One has only to turn his rented seat 
face down upon the pavement, like an excited crap-player, to assure 
his possession of it upon his return from the parading throng, whose 
shuffling feet and animated chatter drown out the music a few yards 
away, and no great harm done. In that slow-moving procession one 
may see the mayor and all the " quality " of San Juan, a generous sprink- 
ling of Yankees, and scores of American soldiers who know barely a 



260 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

word of English, yet who have a racial politeness and a complete lack 
of rowdyism that is seldom attained by other wearers of our military 
uniform. Then suddenly one is aware of a tingling of the blood as the 
retreta ends with a number that, far from the indifference or scorn it 
evokes in the rest of Latin America, brings all San Juan quickly to its 
feet, males uncovered or standing stiffly at salute — the Star-Spangled 
Banner. 

From the sea-wall one may gaze westward to Cabras Island, with 
its leper prisoners, and beyond to Punta Salinas, " poking its rocky nose 
into the boiling surf." Ferries ply frequently across the bay to pretty 
Catario, but it is far more picturesque at a distance. From San 
Juan, too, the tumbled deep-green hills behind the little town have a 
Japanese-etching effect in the mists of the rainy season that is grad- 
ually lost as one approaches them, as surely as when the sun burns 
it away. 

But there is more to modern San Juan than this old Spanish city 
huddled together on its nose of rock. It has grown in American 
fashion not only by spreading far beyond its original area, but by 
boldly embracing far-flung suburbs within the " city limits." Puerta 
de Tierra, once nothing more than the " land gate " its name implies, 
is almost a city of itself, a pathetic town of countless shacks built of 
tin and dry-goods boxes, spreading down across the railroad to the 
swampy edge of the bay, where anemic babies roll squalling and naked 
in the dirt, and long lines of hollow-eyed women file by an uninviting 
milk-shop, each holding forth a pitifully small tin can. It is far out 
across San Antonio Bridge, however, that the capital has seen most of 
its growth under American rule. More than half of its seventy thou- 
sand, which have raised it, perhaps, to second place among West Indian 
cities, dwell in capacious, well-shaded Miramar and Santurce. Time 
was when its people were content to make the upper story of the 
old town its " residential section," but it is natural that the desire for 
open yards and back gardens should have come with American citizen- 
ship. 

Ponce, on the south coast, gives the false impression of being a larger 
city than the capital, loosely strewn as it is over a dusty flat plain and 
overflowing in hovels of decreasing size into the low foot-hills behind. 
It is the most extensive town in Porto Rico, and, like many of those 
around the coast, lies a few miles back from the sea, for fear of pirates 



OUR PORTO RICO 261 

in the olden days, with a street-car service to its shipping suburb of 
Ponce-Playa. Air-plants festoon its telephone wires, and its mosquitos 
are so aggressive that to dine in its principal hotel is to wage a constant 
battle, while to disrobe and enter a bathroom is a perilous undertaking. 
It was carnival time when we visited Ponce. By day there was lit- 
tle evidence of it, except for the urchins in colored rags who paraded 
the streets and the unusual throngs of gaily garbed citizens who 
crowded the plaza on Sunday afternoon. At night bedlam broke loose, 
though, to tell the truth, the uproar was chiefly caused by automobile- 
horns. The medieval gaieties of this season have sadly deteriorated 
under the staid American influence. What there is left of them takes 
place chiefly within the native clubs, each of which has its turn in 
gathering together the elite of the city and such strangers as can estab- 
lish their ability to conduct' themselves with Latin courtesy. We suc- 
ceeded in imposing ourselves upon the Centro Espanol. But there 
were more spectators than spectacle in its flag and flower-festooned 
interior. Toward ten the throng had thickened to what seemed full 
capacity, but it was made up chiefly of staid dowagers and solemn 
caballeros whose formal manners would have been equally in place at 
a funeral. Only a score of girls wore masks, and these confined their 
festive antics to pushing their way up and down the hall, squeaking 
in a silly falsetto at the more youthful oglers. Even confetti was 
strewn sparingly, evidently for lack of spirit of the occasion, for the 
mere fact that a small bag of it cost $1.50 seemed no drawback to 
those who would be revelers. At the unseemly hour of eleven the 
queen at length made her appearance, escorted to her throne by pages, 
knights and ladies-in-waiting, while courtiers flocked about her with 
insistent manners that could be called courteous only in Latin-Ameri- 
can society. But her beauty was tempered by an expression that sug- 
gested bored annoyance, whether for the tightness of her stays or the 
necessity of avoiding life-long disgrace by choosing one of these press- 
ing suitors before a year had passed there was no polite means of learn- 
ing. The most aggressive swain led her forth and the dancing began. 
It differed but slightly from a dance of " high society " in any other 
part of the world. I wandered into the " bar." But alas ! I had 
forgotten again that I was in my native land. There was something 
pathetically ludicrous in the sight of the score of thirsty Latin-Ameri- 
cans who gazed pensively at the candy, chewinggum, and " soft drinks " 
that decorated what had once been so enticing a sideboard, for after 



262 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

all they were not of a race that had abused the bottled good cheer 
that has vanished. 

Mayagiiez was more like the ghost of a city than a living town. Its 
ugly plaza was a glaring expanse of cracked and wrinkled cement 
across which wandered from time to time a ragged, hungry-looking 
bootblack or a disheveled old woman, dragging her faded calico train, 
and slapping the pavement in languid regularity with her loose slippers. 
On his cracked globe pedestal in the center of the square the statue of 
Columbus stood with raised hand and upturned gaze as if he were 
thanking heaven that he had not been injured in the catastrophe. Of 
the dozen sculptured women perched on the balustrade around the 
place several had lost their lamps entirely ; the rest held them at tipsy 
angles. The massive concrete and mother-of-pearl benches were 
mostly broken in two or fallen from their supports. Workmen were 
demolishing the ruined cathedral at the end of the square, bringing 
down clouds of plaster and broken stone with every blow of their 
picks, and now and then a massive beam or heavy, iron-studded door 
that suggested the wisdom of seeing the sights elsewhere. House after 
house lay in tumbled heaps of debris as we strolled through the broad, 
right-angled streets, along which we met not hundreds, but a scattered 
half-dozen passers-by to the block. The majority of these were 
negroes. The wealthier whites largely abandoned the town after the 
disaster. Spaniards gathered together the remnants of their fortunes 
and returned to more solid-footed Spain; Porto Ricans began anew 
in other parts of the island. The sisters of St. Vincent de Paul have 
a bare two hundred pupils now where once they had two thousand. 
It was hard to believe that this was a city of teeming, over-crowded 
Porto Rico. 

Eighty years ago earthquakes were so continuous in this western 
end of the island that for one notable six months the population ate 
its food raw ; pots would not sit upon the stoves. But the new genera- 
tion had all but forgotten that. Guide-books of recent date assert in 
all sincerity that " Porto Rico is as free from earthquakes as from 
venomous snakes." Then suddenly on the morning of October II, 
1918, a mighty shake came without an instant's warning. Within 
twenty seconds most of Mayagiiez fell down. The sea receded for 
several miles, and swept back almost to the heart of the town, tossing 
before it cement walls, automobiles, huge iron blocks, debris, and 



OUR PORTO RICO 263 

mutilated bodies. Miraculous escapes are still local topics of conver- 
sation. A merchant was thrown a hundred yards — into a boat that 
set him down at length on his own door-step. A great tiled roof fell 
upon a gathering of nuns, and left one of them standing unscratched 
in what had been an opening for a water-pipe. Scientists, corrobor- 
ated by a cable repair-ship, explain that the sea-floor broke in two some 
forty miles westward and dropped several hundred fathoms deeper. 
Lighter quakes have been frequent ever since ; half a dozen of them 
were felt all over Porto Rico during our stay there. The inhabitants 
of all the western end are still nervous. More than one American 
teacher in that region has suddenly looked up to find herself in a de- 
serted school-room, the pupils having jumped out the windows at the 
first suggestion of a tremor. 

Mayagiiez is slowly rebuilding; of reinforced concrete now, or at 
least of wood. Little damage was done on that October morning to 
wooden structures, which is one of the reasons that the crowded hovels 
along the sea front have none of the deserted air of the city proper. A 
still more potent reason is that this class of inhabitants had nowhere else 
to go. By Porto Rican law the entire beach of the island is government 
property, for sixty feet back of the water's edge. As a consequence, 
what would in our own land be the choicest residential section is every- 
where covered with squatters, who pay no rent, and patch their miser- 
able little shelters together out of tin cans, old boxes, bits of driftwood, 
and yagua or palm-leaves, the interior walls covered, if at all, with 
picked-up labels and illustrated newspapers. 

One can climb quickly into the hills from Mayagiiez, with a wonder- 
ful view of the bay, the half-ruined city, with its old gray-red tile roofs, 
rare now in Porto Rico, and seas of cane stretching from the coast to 
the foot-hills, which spring abruptly into mountains, little huts strewn 
everywhere over their crinkled and warty surface as far as the eye 
can see. 

Its three principal cities by no means exhaust the list of impor- 
tant towns in Porto Rico. Indeed the number and the surprising size 
of them cannot but strike the traveler, the extent even of those in the 
interior astounding the recent visitor to Cuba. There is Arecibo, for 
instance, a baking-hot, dusty place on a knoll at the edge of the sea, 
with no real harbor, but a splendid beach — given over to naked urchins 
and foraging pigs — and a railroad station that avoids the town by a 



264 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

mile or more, as if it were suffering from the plague. San German, 
founded by Diego Columbus in 15 12, destroyed times without number 
by pirates, Indians, all the European rivals of Spain, and even by 
mosquitos, which forced its founders to rebuild in a new spot, has 
moved hither and yon about the southwestern corner of the island 
until it is a wonder its own inhabitants can find it by night. Or there 
is Cabo Rojo, where hats of more open weave than the Panama are 
made of the cogolla palm-leaf of the palmetto family. 

Yauco, a bit farther east, is striking chiefly for the variegated hay- 
stack of poor man's hovels resembling beehives, that are heaped up the 
steep hillside in its outskirt and seen from afar off in either direction. 
Guayama is proud, and justly so, of its bulking new church, which is 
so up-to-date that it is fitted with Pullman-car soap-spouts for the sav- 
ing of holy water. Maunabo, among its cane-fields, lies out of reach 
of buccaneer cannon, hurricanes, and tidal waves, like so many of the 
" coast " towns of old Borinquen, and does its seaside business through 
a " Playa " of the same name. It still holds green the memory of the 
stern but playful young American school-master who first taught its 
present generation to salute the Stars and Stripes, but though it boasts 
a faultless cement building now in place of the hovel that posed as 
cscucla publico, in those pioneer days, it seems not to have learned the 
American doctrine of quick expansion as well as some of its fellows. 

Beyond Maunabo the highway climbs through huts and rocks that 
look strangely alike as they lie tossed far up the spur of the central 
range, then past enormous granite boulders that suggest reclining ele- 
phants, and out upon an incredible expanse of cane, with pretty Ya- 
bucoa planted in its center and Porto Rico's dependent islands of Vie- 
ques and Culebra breaking the endless vista of sea to the southward. 
Humacao and Naguabo have several corners worthy a painter's sketch- 
book, and soon the coast-line swings us northward again to sugar- 
choked Fajardo, with its four belching smokestacks, and leaves us 
no choice but to cease our journey mgs by land or return to San Juan. 
There we may dash across or around the bay to Bayamon, a " whale 
of a town and a bad one," in the words of the police chief, but also 
the site of the " City of Puerto Rico " that afterward changed its name 
and location and became the present capital. Of the towns that dot 
the mountainous interior the traveler should not miss Caguas and 
Cayey, Coamo and Comerio, Barranquitas and Juana Diaz, Lares and 
Utuado, and a half-dozen others that are no mere villages, including 
Aibonito (Ai! Bonito ! — Ah! Pretty!) set more than two thousand 



OUR PORTO RICO 265 

feet aloft, and famed for its fresas, which in Porto Rico means a fruit 
that grows on a thorny bush beside the little streams of high altitudes, 
that looks like a cross between a luscious strawberry and a mammoth 
raspberry and tastes like neither. 

But it is high time now to descend to Coamo Springs for the one un- 
failingly hot bath in the West Indies — when one can induce the serv- 
ants to produce the key to it. 

Some eighty years ago a man was riding over the breakneck trail 
from Coamo to Ponce to pay a bill — there is a fishy smell to that 
last detail, but let it pass — when he lost his way and stumbled by 
accident upon a hot spring. Making inquiries, he found that the 
region belonged to a druggist in the southern metropolis and that his 
own broad acres bounded the property on the left. He called on the 
druggist and after the lengthy preliminaries incident to any Spanish- 
American deal, offered to sell his own land to the apothecary. 

" It 's of no use to me," he explained, " and as you have the adjoining 
land — and — and " 

" Why," cried the druggist, " my own finca is not worth a peseta to 
me! Why on earth should I be buying yours also?" 

;< Well, then, I '11 buy yours of you," suggested the horseman ; 
" there is no sense in having two owners to a tract that really belongs 
together. Let 's settle the matter and be done with it. I happen to 
have two thousand dollars with me. I was going to pay a debt with 
it " — the fishy smell was no olfactory illusion, you see — " but — " 

The druggist jumped at the chance, the titles were transferred, and 
the horseman rode homeward — no doubt giving his creditor a wide 
berth. He built a shack beside the hot spring, carved out a bath in the 
rock, invited his friends, who also found the strange custom pleasant, 
and gradually there grew up around the place a hotel famous for its — 
gambling. Clients willingly slept in chairs by day, when rooms were 
full, if only they could lose their money by night. By the time the 
Americans came Coamo Springs was synonymous with the quick ex- 
change of fortunes. A more modern hotel had been built, with a 
broad roofed stairway leading down, to the baths, and rooms enough 
to ensure every gambler a morning siesta. Then one day — so the 
story goes, though I refuse to be haled into court to vouch for it — an 
American governor who was particularly fond of the attraction of the 
place, betook too freely of the now forbidden nectars and ended by 
smashing up most of the furniture within reach, whereupon the pro- 
prietor sent him a bill for $1000 damages. Two days later the gov- 



266 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ernor learned officially, to his unbounded surprise, that gambling was 
going on at Coamo Springs ! The place was at once raided, and to- 
day the most model of old ladies may visit it without the slightest risk 
of having her sensibilities so much as pin-pricked. 

I came near forgetting entirely, however, what is perhaps the most 
typical town of Porto Rico. Aguadilla, nestling in the curve of a wide 
bay on the northwest coast, where the foot-hills come almost down 
to the sea, and with a pretty little isle in the hazy offing, has much the 
same proportion between its favored few and its poverty-stricken 
many as the island itself. A monument a mile from town commemor- 
ates the landing of Columbus in 1493 to obtain water, though Aguada, 
a bit farther south, also claims that honor. The distinctly Spanish 
church, too, contains beautiful hand-oarved reproductions in wood 
of Murillo's " Assumption " and " Immaculate Conception," note- 
worthy as the only unquestionably artistic church decorations in Porto 
Rico. The merely human traveler, however, will find these things of 
scant interest compared to the vast honeycomb of hovels that make up 
all but the heart of Aguadilla. 

The hills, as I have said, come close down to the sea here, leaving 
little room for the pauperous people of all Porto Rican suburbs. 
Hence those of Aguadilla have stacked their tiny shacks together in 
the narrow rocky canyons between the mountain-flanking railroad and 
the sea-level. So closely are these hundreds of human nests crowded 
that in many places even a thin man can pass between them only by 
advancing sidewise. Built of weather-blackened bits of boxes, most 
of them from " the States," with their addresses and trademarks still 
upon them, and of every conceivable piece of rubbish that can deflect 
a ray of sunshine or the gaze of passers-by, they look far less like 
dwellings than abandoned kennels thrown into one great garbage- 
heap. Of furnishing they have almost none, not even a chair to sit 
on in many cases. The occupants squat upon the floor, or at best take 
turns in the " hammock," a ragged gunnysack tied at both ends and 
stretched from corner to corner of the usually single room. A few 
have one or two soiled and crippled cots, but never the suggestion of a 
mosquitero, though the mosquitos hold high revel even by day in this 
breathless amphitheater. For wash-tubs they use a strip of yagua 
pinned together at one end with a sliver and set on the sloping ground 
beneath the hut to keep the water from running away at the other. 
The families are usually large, in spite of an appalling infant mortality, 



OUR PORTO RICO 267 

and half a dozen children without clothing enough between them to 
properly cover the smallest are almost certain to be squalling, quarrel- 
ing, and rolling about the pieced-together floor or on the ground be- 
neath it. 

For the hovels are always precariously set up on pillars of broken 
stone under their four corners, and the earth under them is the family 
playground and washroom. There is no provision whatever for sewer- 
age ; water must be lugged up the steep hillside from the better part 
of the town below. Break-neck ladder-steps, slippery with mud and 
with a broken rung or two, connect ground and doorway. The pov- 
erty of Haiti, where at least there is spaciousness, seems slight indeed 
compared to this. 

Yet this is no negro quarter. Many of the inhabitants are of pure 
Caucasian blood, and the majority of them have only a tinge of African 
color. Features and characteristics that go with diligence and energy, 
with success in life, are to be seen on every hand. Nor is it a com- 
munity of alms-seekers. It toils more steadily than you or I to be 
self-supporting; the difficulty is to find something at which to toil. 
Scores of the residents own their solar, or patch of rock on which their 
hut stands ; many own the hut itself. Others pay their monthly rental, 
though they live for days on a handful of plantains — pathetic rentals 
of from twenty to thirty cents a month for the solar and as much for 
the hovel, many of which are owned by proud citizens down in the 
white-collar part of the town. 

For all their abject poverty these hapless people are smiling and 
cheerful, sorry for their utter want, yet never ashamed of it, con- 
vinced that it is due to no fault of their own. That is a pleasing 
peculiarity of all the huddled masses of Porto Rico. They are quite 
ready to talk, too, on closely personal subjects that it is difficult to 
bring up in more urbane circles, and to discuss their condition in a 
quaintly impersonal manner, with never a hint of whining. 

I talked with an old woman who was weaving hats. She lived alone, 
all her family having died, of under-nourishment, no doubt, though 
she called it something else. The hat she was at work upon would 
be sold to the wholesalers for thirty cents ; it was almost the equal of the 
one I wore, which had cost five dollars, — and the material for two of 
them cost her twenty cents. She could barely make one a day, what 
with her cooking and housework. Cooking of what, for Heaven's 
sake? Oh, yams and tubers, now and then a plantain from a kind 
friend she had. One really required very little for such labor. She 



268 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

smiled upon me as I descended her sagging ladder and wished me much 
prosperity. 

A muscular fellow a bit farther on, white of skin as a Scandinavian, 
was " a peon by trade," but there was seldom work to be had. He 
sold things in the streets. It was a lucky day when he made a profit 
of fifteen cents. His wife made hats, too. With three children there 
was no help for it, much as he would like to support his family unas- 
sisted. The house ? No, it was not his — yet ; though he owned the 
solar. The house would cost $32; meanwhile he was paying thirty 
cents a month for it. 

A frail little woman in the early thirties looked up from her lace- 
making as I paused in her doorway. In her lap was a small, round, 
hard cushion with scores of pins stuck in it, and a wooden bobbin at 
the end of each white thread. She clicked the bits of wood swiftly as 
she talked, like one who enjoyed conversation, but could not afford 
to lose time at it. Yes, she worked all day and usually well into the 
night — nodding at a wick in a little can of tallow. By doing that she 
could make a whole yard of lace, and get eighty cents for it. It took 
a spool and a third of thread — American thread, mira usted — at ten 
cents a spool. Fortunately, she was young and strong, though her 
eyes hurt sometimes, and people said this work was bad on the lungs. 
But she had her mother to support, who was too old to do much of 
anything — the toothless crone, grinning amiably, slouched forward 
out of the " next house," which was really another room like the in- 
credibly piece-meal shack in which I stood, though with a separate 
roof. The rent of the two was thirty cents ; they were worth thirteen 
dollars — the lace-maker mentioned that enormous sum with a catch 
in her breath. Then she had a little girl. There had been four chil- 
dren, but three had died. Her husband was gone, too — Oh, yes, she 
had been really married. They had paid $3.75 for the ceremony. 
She had heard that the Protestants did it cheaper, but of course when 
one is born a Catholic. . . . Some women in the quarter were " only 
married by God," but that was not their fault. She never had time 
to go to mass, but she had been to confession four times. There had 
been no charge for that. Her daughter — the frizzly-headed little tot 
of six or seven had come in munching a mashed boniato in a tiny 
earthen bowl, with a broken spoon — went to school every day. She 
hoped for a great future for her. She had gone to school herself, 
but she " was n't given to learn." She could n't get the child the food 
the teacher said was good for her. Even rice was sixteen cents a 



OUR PORTO RICO 269 

pound, and those — pointing to three or four miserable roots in the 
burlap " hammock " — cost from one to four cents apiece now. i\nd 
clothing! Would I just feel the miserable stuff her waist was made 
of — it was miserable indeed, though snowy white. Then she had 
to buy a board now and then for two or three cents to patch the house ; 
the owner would never do it. Once she had tried working in a ware- 
house down by the wharf. The Spaniards said they paid a dollar a 
day for cleaning coffee — because the law would not let them pay less, 
or work women more than eight hours a day. Yet the cleaners must 
do two bags a day or they did n't get the dollar, and no woman could 
do that if she worked ten, or even twelve, hours. Clever fellows, those 
peninsular cs! The little basket of oranges in the doorway? Oh, she 
sold those to people in the gully, when any of them could buy. Some 
days she made nothing on them, at other times as much as four cents 
profit. But " that goes for my vice, for I smoke cigarettes," she con- 
cluded, as if confessing to some great extravagance. 

Down in the plaza that night a score of ragged men lolled about a 
cement bench discussing wages and the cost of food. Beans cost a 
fortune now ; sugar was sixteen cents ; coffee, their indispensable coffee, 
thirty-two. They did not mention bread; the Porto Rican of the 
masses seldom indulges in that luxury. And with the sugar centrals 
in the neighborhood paying scarcely a dollar a day, even when one 
could find work ! " I tell you, we working-men are too tame," con- 
cluded one of them ; " we should fight, rob. . . ." But he said it in a 
half-joking, harmless way that is characteristic of his class through 
all Porto Rico. 

It is time, however, that we leave the towns and get out among the 
jibaros, as the countrymen are called, from a Spanish word for a 
domesticated animal that has gone wild again. 

The American Railroad of Porto Rico was originally French, as its 
manager is still. Though it is narrow-gauge, it has a comfort and aseo 
unknown even in Cuba, a cleanliness combined with all the smaller 
American conveniences, ice water, sanitary paper cups, blotter-roll 
towels — prohibition has at least done away with the yelping train- 
boy and made it possible to drink nature's beverage without exciting 
comment. Its fares are higher than in the United States, — three cents 
a kilometer in first and 2% in the plain little second-class coaches with 
their hard wooden benches that make up most of the train. The 
single first-class car is rarely more than half filled, for all its comfort- 



270 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

able swivel chairs. Automobiles and the lay of the land, that makes 
Ponce less than half as far over the mountain as by rail, accounts for 
this; though by night the sleeping-car at the rear is fully occupied by 
men, usually men only, who have adopted the American custom of 
saving their days for business. The sleeping compartments are ar- 
ranged in ship's-cabin size and run diagonally across the car, to leave 
room for a passageway within the narrow coach. These two-bunk 
cabins are furnished with individual toilet facilities, thermos bottles of 
ice water, and electric lights, and many Porto Ricans have actually 
learned that an open window does not necessarily mean a slumberer 
turned to a corpse by morning. The trainmen are polite and obliging 
in an unostentatious way that make our own seem ogres by comparison. 
In short, it is a diligent, honest little railroad suiting the size of the 
country and with no other serious fault than a tendency to stop again 
at another station almost before it has gotten well under way. 

For nearly an hour the train circles San Juan bay, the gleaming, 
heaped-up capital, or its long line of lights, according to the hour, re- 
maining almost within rifle-shot until the crowded suburbs of Bayamon 
spring up on each side. Then come broadening expanses of cane, 
with throngs of men and women working in the fields, interpersed 
with short stretches of arid sand, or meadows bright with pink morn- 
ing-glories and dotted with splendid reddish cattle. Beyond comes 
a fruit district. Under Spanish rule scarcely enough fruit was grown 
in Porto Rico to supply the local demand. The Americans, struck 
with the excellency of the wild fruit, particularly of the citrus variety, 
began to develop this almost unknown industry. But among the 
pathetic sights of the island is to see acre after acre of grape-fruit, 
unsurpassed in size and quality, rotting on the trees or on the ground 
beneath them. While Americans are paying fabulous prices for their 
favorite breakfast fruit, many a grower in Porto Rico is hiring men 
to haul away the locally despised toronjas and bury them. Lack of 
transportation is the chief answer — that and a bit of market manipula- 
tion. Not long ago the discovery that the bottled juice of grapefruit 
and pineapple made a splendid beverage led a company to undertake 
what should be a booming enterprise, with the thirsty mainland as 
chief consumers. But the promoters quickly struck an unexpected 
snag. The available supply of bottles, strange to relate, was quickly 
exhausted, and to-day the company manager gazes pensively from his 
windows across prolific, yet unproductive, orchards. 

The pale-green of cane-fields becomes monotonous; then at length 



OUR PORTO RICO 271 

the blue sea breaks again on the horizon. Beyond Arecibo the rail- 
road runs close along the shore, with almost continuous villages of 
shaggy huts half hidden among the endless cocoanut-grove that girdles 
Porto Rico, the waves lapping at the roots of the outmost trees. These 
without exception are encircled by broad bands of tin. During an 
epidemic of bubonic plague the mongoose was introduced into the 
island, as into nearly all the West Indies, to exterminate the rats. 
The rodents developed new habits and took to climbing the slanting 
cocoanut trees, which afforded both food and a place of refuge. The 
bands of tin have served their purpose. To-day both rats and snakes 
are scarce in Porto Rico, but the inhabitants discovered too late that 
the chicken-loving mongoose may be an even greater pest than those 
it has replaced. Cocoanuts brought more than one Porto Rican a 
quick fortune during the war. Now that the gas-mask has degener- 
ated into a mural decoration, however, immense heaps of the fibrous 
husks lie shriveling away where the armistice overtook them, and even 
the favorable state of the copra market seems incapable of shaking 
the growers out of their racial apathy. 

Several pretty towns on knolls against a background of sea attract 
the eye as the train bends southward along the west coast. Below 
Quebradillas the railroad swings in a great horseshoe curve down into 
a little sea-level valley, plunges through two tunnels, and crawls along 
the extreme edge of a bold precipitous coast, past mammoth tumbled 
rocks, and all but wetting its rails in the dashing surf. A few tobacco 
patches spring up here, where the mountains crowd the cane-fields out 
of existence, women and children patiently hoeing, and men plowing 
the pale-red soil behind brow-yoked oxen. Crippled Mayaguez drags 
slowly by, new seas of cane appear, then the splendid plain of San 
German, with its vista of grazing cattle and its pepinos gordos, reddish 
calabashes clinging to their climbing vines like huge sausages. Beyond, 
there is little to see, except canefields and the Caribbean, until we rumble 
into Ponce, spread away up its foothills like a city laid out in the sun 
to dry. On the southeastern horizon lies an island the natives call 
Caja de Muertos — " deadman's box," and it looks indeed like a coffin, 
with the lighthouse on its highest point resembling a candle set there 
by some pious mourner. Local tradition has it that this is the original 
of Stevenson's " Treasure Island." 

The train turns back from Ponce, but the railroad does not, and 
one may rumble on behind a smaller engine to Guayama. Some day 
the company hopes to get a franchise for the eastern end of the island 



272 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

and encircle it entirely. A private railroad covers a third of the re- 
maining distance as it is. But the traveler bent on circumnavigating 
all Porto Rico must trust to guaguas, an automobile, or his own ex- 
ertions through this region, and swinging in a great curve around the 
Luquillo range, with the cloud-capped summit of the island purple and 
hazy above him, eventually fetches up once more in sea-lashed San 
Juan. By this time, I warrant, he will long for other landscapes than 
spreading canefields. 

Sugar was shipped from Porto Rico as early as 1533, but the Span- 
iards gave it less attention than they did coffee. For one thing their 
methods were antiquated. Two upright wooden rollers under a 
thatched roof, turned by a yoke or two of oxen, was the customary 
cane-crusher. Here and there one of these may be seen to this day. 
The big open iron kettles in which they boiled the syrup are still strewn 
around the coast, some of them occupied in the plebeian task of catch- 
ing rain-water from hovel roofs, many more rusting away like aban- 
doned artillery of a by-gone age. All the coastal belt is dotted with 
the ruins of old brick sugar-mills, their stocky square chimneys broken 
off at varying heights from the ground, like aged tombs of methods 
that have passed away. They do not constitute a direct loss, but rather 
unavoidable sacrifices to the exacting god of modern progress, for 
barely sixty per cent, of the sugar contents was extracted by the con- 
trivances of those ox-gaited, each-planter-for-himself days. 

It is natural that combinations of former estates, with immense cen- 
tral engenios, should have followed American possession. To-day four 
great companies control the sugar output of Porto Rico, from Guanica 
on the west to Fajardo in the east. Like the mammoth central of 
Cuba, they reckon their production in hundreds of thousands of bags 
and utilize all the aids of modern science in their processes. Their 
problem, however, is more complex than that in the almost virgin 
lands of Cuba and Santo Domingo. The acreage available for cane 
production is definitely limited ; virtually all of it has been cultivated 
for centuries. Charred stumps and logs of recent deforestation are 
unknown in Porto Rican canefields. Instead there is the acrid scent 
of patent fertilizers and, particularly in the south, elaborate systems of 
irrigation. After each cutting the fields must be replanted ; in Cuba 
and the Dominican Republic they reproduce for eight to twelve years. 
A few areas never before devoted to cane have recently been planted, 
but they are chiefly small interior valleys and the loftier foothills well 




There are school accommodations for only half the children of our Porto Rico 




The home of a lace maker in Aquadillo 




The Porto Rican method of making lace 



OUR PORTO RICO 273 

back from the coast. For the Porto Rican sugar producer is forced 
to encroach upon the mountains in a way that his luckier fellows of the 
larger islands to the westward would scorn, and his fields of cane are 
sometimes as billowy as a turbulent Atlantic. 

Porto Rico was in the midst of a wide-spread strike among the sugar 
workers during our stay there. All through this busiest month of 
February there had been constant parades of strikers along the coast 
roads by day and thronged mitines in the towns each evening. The 
paraders were with few exceptions law-abiding and peaceful despite 
the scores of red flags that followed the huge Stars and Stripes at the 
head of each procession. When the authorities protested, the strike 
leaders explained that red had long stood as the symbol of the laboring 
class in Spanish countries. They were astounded to learn that to 
people beyond the blue sea that surrounds them, the color meant law- 
lessness and revolt by violence, and they lost no time in adopting in- 
stead a green banner. When this in turn was found to have a similar 
significance in another island somewhere far away, they chose a white 
flag. It was not a matter of one color or another, they said, but of 
sufficient food to feed their hungry families. 

Negro spell-binders from the cities, evil-faced fellows for the most 
part, whose soft hands showed no evidence of ever having wielded a 
cane-knife, harangued the barefoot multitudes in moonlighted town 
streets. W 7 hen the head of the movement was taken to task by neutr-al 
fellow-citizens for not choosing lieutenants more capable of arousing 
general public sympathy and confidence, he replied with a fervent, " I 
wish to God I could ! " But the ranks of Porto Rican workmen do 
not easily yield men of even the modicum of education required to 
spread-eagle a public meeting. Held down for centuries to almost 
the level of serfs, they have little notion of how to use that modern 
double-edged weapon, the strike. They do not put their heads to- 
gether, formulate their demands, and carry them to their employers. 
Inert by nature and training, they plod on until some outside agitator 
comes along and tells them they shall get higher wages if only they 
will follow his leadership, whisper to one another that it would be 
nice to have more money, and quit work, with no funds to support 
themselves in idleness or any other preparation. It is the old irre- 
sponsibility, the lack of foreplanning common to the tropics. Then, 
that they may not be the losers whichever side wins, they strive to 
keep on good terms with their employers by telling them that only the 
fear of violence from their fellows keeps them from coming to work, 



274 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

being so docile by nature that they would not hurt even the feelings 
of their superiors. 

This time the strikers had been encouraged by what they mistook 
to be federal support. The American Federation of Labor had sent 
down as investigating delegates two men of forceful Irish wit who 
were naturally appalled to find their new fellow-citizens living under 
conditions unequalled even among their ancestral peat-bogs. What 
they did not recognize was that all over Latin-America, even where land 
is virtually unlimited and there are no corporations to " exploit " the 
populace, the masses live in much the same thatched-hut degradation. 
Their familiarity, with the Porto Rican environment was as negative 
as their knowledge of the Spanish language ; they made the almost uni- 
versal American mistake of thinking that what is true of the United 
States is equally so of all other countries, and their straight-forward 
national temperament made them, no match for the wily, intricate 
machinations of native politicians. 

Porto Rico had not been so lively since the Americans ousted the 
Spaniards. I had an opportunity of hearing both sides of the case, 
for with the privilege of the mere observer I was equally welcome — 
whatever the degree may have been — in the touring car of the dele- 
gates and at the dinner-tables of the sugar managers. 

" These simple fellows from the States," said the latter, " think they 
can solve the problem of over-population by giving $2.50 a day to all 
laborers, good or bad, weak or strong. The result would be to drive 
the best workmen out of the country, and leave us, our stock-holders, 
and the consumers, victims of the poorest. Like the labor union move- 
ment everywhere, it would give the advantage to the weakling, the 
scamper, the time-killer. We have men in our fields who earn $3.50 
a day, and who will tell you they do not know why on earth they are 
striking. Men who can cut six tons of cane a day on piece-work will 
not cut one ton at day wages. Then there are men so full of the hook- 
worm that they have n't the strength to earn one dollar a day. We 
centrals insist on keeping the ajuste system that has always prevailed in 
Porto Rico — the letting of work by contract to self-appointed gang 
leaders ; and we will not sign a minimum wage scale because there is 
no responsible person to see that the terms are carried out on the 
laborer's side. We refuse to deal with the strikers' committees because 
we cannot listen to a lot of bakers and barbers from the towns who 
do not know sugarcane from swamp reeds. There is nothing but 
politics back of it all any way. This is a presidential year; that ex- 



OUR PORTO RICO 275 

plains the sudden interest of politicians in the poor down-trodden 
laboring class. Our men earn at least $1.75 a day — and they seldom 
work in the fields after two in the afternoon. Besides that we give 
every employee a twenty per cent, bonus, a house to live in if he 
chooses, free medical attention, half-time when they are sick, and the 
privilege of buying their supplies in our company stores at cost. Cuba 
pays higher wages, but the companies get most of it back through 
their stores. We run ours at a loss; I can prove it to you by our 
books ; and we give much to charity. Hungry indeed ! Do you know 
that our biggest sales to our laborers are costly perfumes? They may 
starve their children, but they can always feed fresh eggs to their 
fighting-cocks. There is hardly a man of them that is not keeping 
two or three women. If we paid our men twice what we do, the only 
result would be that they would lay off every other day. Let them 
strike ! We can always get hillmen from the interior or men from 
Aguadilla who are only too glad to work for even less than we are 
paying now." 

I found Santiago Iglesias literally up to his ears in work at the 
headquarters of the Socialist-Labor party, a few doors from the gov- 
ernor's palace. About him swarmed several of the foxy-faced in- 
dividuals he had himself privately deplored as assistants. A powerful 
man in the prime of life, of pure Spanish blood, the radical Porto 
Rican senator was quite ready to recapitulate once more his view of 
the situation. If he was "playing politics" — and what elective gov- 
ernment official is not every time he opens his mouth or turns over 
in bed? — he gave at least the impression of being genuinely distressed 
at the condition of Porto Rico's poverty-bred masses. We had con- 
versed for some time in Spanish before he surprised me by breaking 
forth into a vigorous English, amusing for its curious errors of pro- 
nunciation. The minimum wage demanded, for instance, which re- 
curred in almost every sentence, always emerged from his lips with 
the second f transformed into an s. That is the chief trouble with 
Santiago, according to his opponents — his methods are "too fisty." 

" There has been a vast improvement in personal liberty in Porto 
Rico under American rule," he began. " But the island has been sur- 
rendered to Wall Street, to the heartless corporations that always 
profit most by American expansion. Moreover, American rule has 
forced upon us American prices — it always does — without giving 
our people the corresponding income. Formerly all our wealth went 
to Spain. Now it goes to the States, but with this difference, — under 



276 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Spanish rule wages were low but the employers were paternal; they 
thought occasionally about their peons. At least the workers got 
enough to eat. The corporations that have taken their place are utterly 
impersonal ; the workmen who sweat in the sun for them are no more 
to the far away stock-holders than the canes that pass between the 
rollers of their sugar-mills. When they get these magnificent returns 
on their investment do the Americans who hold stocks and bonds in 
our great centrals ever ask themselves how the men who are actually 
earning them are getting on? No, they sit tight in their comfortable 
church pews giving thanks to the Lord with a freer conscience than 
ever did the Spanish conquistadores, for they are too far away ever 
to see the sufferings of their peons. 

" The sugar companies can produce sugar at a hundred dollars a 
ton ; they are getting two hundred and forty. The common stock of 
the four big ones, paid from fifty-six to seventy dollars last year on 
every hundred dollars invested, not to mention a lot of extra dividends, 
and their profits for this zafra will be far higher. The island is being 
pumped dry of its resources and nothing is being put back into it. In 
the States not twenty per cent, of the national income goes out of the 
country ; the rest goes back into reproduction. In Porto Rico seventy 
per cent, goes to foreigners, and of the thirty left wealthy Porto Ricans 
spend a large amount abroad. We do not want our land all used to 
enrich non-resident stock-holders ; we need it to feed our own people. 
There is not corn-meal and beans enough now to go round, because 
the big sugar centrals hold all the fertile soil. They have bought all 
the land about them, even the foot-hills, so that the people cannot 
plant anything, but must work for the companies. Stock-holders are 
entitled to a fair profit on the capital actually invested — actually, I 
say — and something for the risk taken — which certainly is not great. 
But the Porto Ricans, the men, and women, and the scrawny children 
who do the actual work in the broiling tropical sun should get the rest 
of it, in wages. We should tax non-resident sugar companies ten per 
cent, of their income for the improvement of Porto Rico; we should 
borrow several millions in the States and give our poor people land 
to cultivate, and pay the loan back out of that tax. But what can we 
do? The politicians, the high officials are all interested in sugar. 
They and the corporations form the invisible government; they are the 
law, the police, the rulers, the patriots. Patriots! The instant the 
Porto Rican income-tax was set at half that in the States the corpora- 
tions made Porto Rico their legal residence. When the federal gov- 



OUR PORTO RICO 277 

ernment would not stand for the trick and forced them to pay the 
balance they cried unto high Heaven. Porto Rican law forbids any 
company or individual to own more than five hundred acres. They 
get around the law by trickery, by dividing the holdings among the 
members of the same family, by making fake divisions of company 
stock. The Secretary of War and other federal officials come down 
here to ' investigate.' They motor across our beautiful mountains, 
have two or three banquets in the homes of the rich or the central 
managers, and the newspapers in the States shout ' Great Prosperity 
in Porto Rico!' I tell you it is the criminal lack of equity, the same 
old blindness of the landed classes the world over and in all ages that 
is driving Porto Rico into the camp of the violent radicals. 

" You admire our fine roads. All visitors do. You do not realize 
that they were built because the corporations needed them. And did 
we pay for them by taxing the corporations? We did not. We paid 
for them by government bonds — that is, we charged them up to the 
children of the peons. You have probably found that we have inade- 
quate school facilities. The corporations, the invisible government, 
do not want the masses educated, because then they would not have 
left any easily manipulated laboring class. Nor do I take much stock 
in this over-population idea. At least I should like to see the half 
million untilled acres turned over to the people before I will believe 
emigration is necessary. Sixty per cent, of Porto Rico is uncultivated, 
yet eighty per cent, of the population goes to bed hungry every night 
in the year. Then there is this cry of hookworm. Do not let the 
Rockefeller Foundation, a direct descendant of the capitalists, tell you 
lies about ' anemia.' The anemia of Porto Rico comes from no 
worm, but from the fact that the people are always hungry. It is 
the sordid miserliness of corporations, bent on keeping our peons re- 
duced to the level of serfs, in order that they may always have a cheap 
supply of labor, that is the fundamental cause of the misery of Porto 
Rico, of the naked, barefoot, hungry, schoolless, homeless desolation of 
the working classes." 

The calm and neutral observer, neither underfed nor blessed with 
the task of clipping sugar-stock coupons, detects a certain amount of 
froth on the statements of both parties to the controversy in Porto Rico. 
But he cannot but wonder why the sweat-stained laborers in the corn- 
fields should be seen wearily tramping homeward to a one-room thatched 
hovel to share a few boiled roots with a slattern woman and a swarm 
of thin-shanked children while the Americans who direct them from 



278 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the armchair comfort of fan-cooled offices stroll toward capacious 
bungalows, pausing on the way for a game of tennis in the company 
compound, and sit down to a faultless dinner amid all that appeals 
to the aesthetic senses. Least of all can he reconcile the vision of 
other Americans, whose only part in the production of sugar is the 
collecting of dividends, rolling about the island in luxurious touring 
cars, with the sight of the toil-worn, ragged workers whose uncouth 
appearance arouses the haughty travelers to snorts of scorn or falsetto 
shrieks of " how picturesque." 

The problem in Porto Rico, as the reader has long since suspected, is 
the antithesis of that in Santo Domingo. In the latter island the diffi- 
culty is to get laborers enough to develop the country ; in the former 
it is to find labor enough to occupy the swarming population. Barely 
three-fourths of a million people are scattered through the broad in- 
sular wilderness to the westward ; the census of 1920 shows little 
Porto Rico crowded with 1,263,474 inhabitants, that is nearly four 
hundred persons to the square mile. There are several reasons for this 
discrepancy ; for one thing Santo Domingo has been righting itself 
for generations, while Porto Rico has never had a revolution. The 
*'*'' obvious solution of the problem has two serious drawbacks. The 
Dominicans do not welcome immigration ; they wish to keep their 
country to themselves. The Porto Rican is inordinately fond of his 
birthplace. Send him to the most distant part of the world and he 
is sure sooner or later to come back to his beloved Borinquen. Emi- 
gration from the island can reach even moderate success only when 
entire families are sent. The letters of Porto Rican soldiers no nearer 
the front than Florida or Panama were filled with wails of homesickness 
that would have been pitiful had they not been tinged with what to the 
unemotional Anglo-Saxon was a suggestion of the ludicrous. 

There is a Japanese effect in the density of population of our little 
West Indian colony. When the traveler has motored for hours with- 
out once getting out of sight of human habitations, when he has noted 
how the unpainted little shacks speckle the steepest hillside, even among 
the high mountains, when he has seen the endless clusters of hovels that 
surround every town, whether of the coast or the interior, he will come 
to realize the crowded condition. If he is a trifle observant, he will 
also see everywhere signs of the scarcity of work. Men lounging in 
the doors of their huts in the middle of the day, surrounded by pale 
women and children sucking a joint of sugar-cane, are not always 



OUR PORTO RICO 279 

loafers ; in many cases they have nowhere to go and work. While the 
Women toil at making lace, drawn-work, or hats, the males turn their 
hands to anything that the incessant struggle for livelihood suggests. 
The man who spends two days in weaving a laundry basket and plods 
fifteen or twenty miles to sell it for sixty cents is only one of a thou- 
sand commonplace sights along the island highways. 

A job is a prize in Porto Rico. If one is offered, applicants swarm; 
many a man " lays off " in order to lend his job to his brother, his 
cousin, or his compadre. Naturally, employers take advantage of this 
condition. The American labor delegates told the chief of police that 
he should be the first to lead his men on strike, for certainly he could 
not keep them honest at forty-five dollars a month. 

" Oh, yes, I can," retorted the chief, " for while we have barely eight 
hundred on the force, there are twelve thousand on the waiting-list, and 
every policeman knows that if he is fired, he will have to go back to 
punching bullocks at a third as much." Mozos and chambermaids in 
the best hotels seldom get more than five dollars a month. Street-car 
men get from sixteen to twenty-five cents an hour, depending on the 
length of service. In a large clothing factory of Mayagiiez, fitted with 
motor-run sewing-machines, only a few of the women get a dollar a 
day; the majority average fifty cents. The law, of course, requires 
that they be paid a minimum wage of a dollar; but what is a mere 
law among a teeming population which the Spaniards spent four cen- 
turies in training to be manso and uncomplaining? The favorite trick 
is to pay the dollar, and then fine the women fifty cents for not having 
done sufficient work. Among the regrettable sights of the island are 
groups of callous emissaries frequenting the leading hotels who have 
been sent down as agents of certain American department stores to 
reap advantage from the local poverty. These comisionistas motor 
about the island, placing orders with the wretched native women, but 
by piece-work, you may be sure, to avoid the requirement of paying 
a dollar a day. American women who are paying several times what 
they once did for Porto Rican lace, blouses, and drawn-work, may fancy 
that some of this increase goes to the humble mujeres who do the work. 
Not at all. They are still toiling in their miserable little huts at the 
same ludicrous prices, while their products are being sold on the 
" bargain " counters in our large cities, at several hundred per cent, 
profit. So thoroughly have these touts combed the country that the 
individual can nowhere buy of the makers; their work has all been 
contracted far in advance. 



CHAPTER XII 

WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 

THE American who, noting the Stars and Stripes flying every- 
where and post-offices selling the old familiar postage-stamps, 
fancies he is back in his native land again is due for a shock. 
Though it has been Americanized industrially, Porto Rico has changed 
but little in its e very-day life. Step out of one of the three principal 
hotels of the capital and you are in a foreign land. Spanish is as neces- 
sary to the traveler in Porto Rico who intends to get out of the 
Condado-Vanderbilt-automobile belt as it is in Cuba, Mexico, or South 
America. Though it is not quite true that " base-ball and poker are 
the only signs of American influence," the other evidences might be 
counted on the fingers. There is the use of personal checks in place 
of actual money, for instance ; venders of chickens carry them in 
baskets instead of by the legs. Offenders are tried by a jury of their 
peers ; the native regiment wears the uniform of our regular army ; 
it would take deep reflection to think of many more instances. Only 
one daily newspaper in Porto Rico has an English edition. The first 
American theatrical company to visit the island since the United States 
took it over was due the week we left. There are barely ten thou- 
sand American residents ; except in the capital and the heart of two or 
three other cities one attracts as much gaping attention as in the wilds 
of Bolivia. In a way this conservatism is one of the charms of the 
island. The mere traveler is agreeably disappointed to find that it has 
not been " Americanized " in the unpleasant sense of the word, that 
it has kept much of its picturesque, old-world atmosphere. 

English is little spoken in Porto Rico. That is another of the sur- 
prises it has in store for us, at least for those of us old enough to re- 
member what a splurge we made of swamping the island with Ameri- 
can teachers soon after we took it over. It is indeed the " official " 
language, but the officials who speak it are rare, unless they come from 
the United States, in which case they are almost certain to be equally 
ignorant of Spanish. The governor never stirs abroad without an 
interpreter. The chief of police rarely ventures a few words of 

280 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 281 

Castilian, though there is scarcely a patrolman even in the heart of 
San Juan who can answer the simplest question in English. Can any 
one think up a valid reason why a fair command of the official tongue 
should not be required of natives seeking government employment? 
Spanish is a delightful language ; its own children are no more fond 
of it than I am. But after all, Porto Rico differs from the rest of 
Spanish-America, in that it is a part of the United States. She aspires 
some day to statehood. That day should not come until she knows 
English ; it is not a question of one language in place of another, but 
of mutual understanding. 

To be sure, English is compulsory in all the schools of the island, 
but few pupils learn it thoroughly enough to retain it through life. 
Most of them can read it in a parrot-like manner; if they speak it at 
all, it is to shout some half -intelligible phrase after a passing American. 
" Aw right " is about the only expression that has been thoroughly 
Portoricanized. That is not exactly the fault of the pupils. The ear 
shudders at the " English " spoken even by those teachers who are sup- 
posed to be specialists in it ; the rest are little short of incomprehensible. 
Passed on from one such instructor to another, the English that finally 
comes down to the pupils resembles the original about as much as an 
oft-repeated bit of gossip resembles the original facts. It might almost 
be said that there has been no progress made in teaching Porto Rico 
English in the twenty years of American rule, or at least in the last 
fifteen of them. 

On the whole the state of education in Porto Rico is a disappointment. 
It is a surprise to the visitor who has thought this essential matter 
was settled long ago to find sixty per cent, of the population illiterate, 
few countrymen over thirty who can read, and scarcely a third of the 
children of school age in school. We had, of course, much to make up. 
In 1898, after four centuries of ostensibly civilized government, there 
was but one building on the island specially erected for educational 
purposes. The total enrollment in the schools, with a population of 
nearly a million, was 26,000. Three-fourths of the males of voting 
age were wholly illiterate. Pupils were " farmed out," teachers drew 
salaries without ever going near a schoolhouse, all the old Spanish 
tricks were in full swing. But that was twenty years ago. Yet the 
department of education asks for twenty years mors to bring things 
up to a "reasonable standard." Why? Moreover, at the rate things 
have been moving it will not nearly do that. The thousand and more 
school-buildings that have been erected, tropical Spanish in architecture, 



282 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

well lighted and ventilated, of concrete in the towns and wood in the 
country, their names in English over the entrances, are all very well, 
but they are far from sufficient. The census taken just before our 
arrival showed almost a half million children of school age, with 181,716 
enrolled, and 146,561 in average attendance. Of the 2984 teachers 
only 148 were Americans. The only inducement Porto Rico offers 
to instructors from " the States " is an appeal to the love of adventure. 
Those who wish to make a trip to the tropics may be sure of a position 
— at a lower salary than they receive at home, and with the privilege 
of paying their own passages down and back to profiteering steamship 
companies. No wonder the " English " of Porto Rico is going to 
seed. 

In the graded school system of the towns all instruction is given 
in that maltreated tongue except the class in Spanish. In the rural 
schools all the work is given in Spanish except a class in so-called 
English as a special subject in all grades above the first. The Uni- 
versity of Porto Rico, seventeen years old, has fewer than a thousand 
students. The Agricultural College in Mayagiiez has some two hun- 
dred. Private institutions like the Polytechnic Institute of San German 
are doing yoeman service, but why should the education of Porto 
Rico depend on private enterprise ? The natives claim that the trouble 
is that nearly all the commissioners of education sent down from the 
United States have been political appointees ; the latter lay the blame 
to the fact that salaries and disbursements are set by the native legis- 
lature. Somewhere between the two the education of Porto Rico is 
suffering. 

For all their misfortunes, or perhaps because of them, the Porto 
Ricans, especially outside the large cities, are hospitable and soft-man- 
nered, characterized by a constant courtesy and a solicitude to please 
those with whom they come in contact, with little of that bruskness of 
intercourse for which "the Mainland " is notorious. The island has 
a less grasping, less materialistic atmosphere than Cuba, it is less sinis- 
ter, less cynical, more naive, its people are more primitive and simple, 
though industrial oppression and American influence are slowly chang- 
ing them in this regard. Their naivete is often delightful. It is re- 
ported that a company of youthful jibaros drafted into the Federal 
service during the war waited on their captain one day and asked for 
their " time," as they did not care for a job in which they had to wear 
shoes ! The children are rarely boisterous, rather well-bred, even 
where little chance for breeding exists. As a race they have kept 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 283 

many of the peculiarities of their Spanish ancestry. They are still 
Latin Americans in their over-developed personal pride and their lack 
of a sense of humor. Moorish seclusion of women still raises its head 
among the " best families." The horror in the slightest suggestion of 
manual labor, of a lowering of caste, still oppresses the " upper " class. 
Few of them would dream of carrying their own suitcase or a package 
from a store, even though they must abandon them for lack of a peon. 
Though they are far more polite than our own club-swingers in super- 
ficial matters, it has required persistent training to get the insular police 
to forget their high standing and help across the street women or 
children of the socially inferior class. Finally, Porto Ricans are little 
to be depended upon in the matter of time ; manana is still their watch- 
word despite twenty years of Anglo-Saxon bustle. But, for that 
matter, Americans get hopelessly irresponsible on this same subject 
after a few years in the tropics. 

The unprepared visitor will find Porto Ricans astonishingly white, 
especially in the interior. There are few full negroes on the island; 
sixty per cent, of the population have straight hair. Yet there is a 
motley mixture of races, without rhyme or reason from our point of 
view. Mulatto estate owners may have pure white peons working for 
them ; a native octoroon is frequently seen ordering about a Gallego serv- 
ant from Spain. There is still considerable evidence of Indian blood in 
the Porto Rican physiognomy, for the aborigines, taking refuge in the 
high mountains, were wiped out only by assimilation. Then there are 
Japanese or Chinese features peering forth from many a hybrid face. 
The Spaniards brought in coolies to work on the military roads, and 
they mixed freely with all the lower ranks of the population. Yet 
pure-blooded Orientals are conspicuous by their absence; so over- 
crowded a community does not appeal even to the ubiquitous Chinese 
laundryman. For the same reason Jews, Syrians, and Armenians have 
not invaded the island in any great numbers, though one now and then 
meets an olive-skinned peddler tramping from village to town with a 
great flat basket filled with bolts of calico and the like on his cylindrical 
head. 

Small commerce is almost entirely in the hands of Spaniards, thanks 
to whom the mixture of races that made Latin- America a hybrid is 
still going on — to say nothing of an exploiting of the simple jibaros 
that would have been scorned by the old straight-forward, sword- 
brandishing conquistadores. The modern Spaniard, especially the 



284 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Canary Islanders, come over as clerks, live like dogs until they have 
acquired an interest in their master's business, and eventually set up 
a little store for themselves. Sharp, thrifty, heartless, utterly devoid 
of any ideal than the amassing of a fortune, they resort to every species 
of trickery to increase their- already exorbitant profits. The favorite 
scheme is to get the naive countrymen into a gambling game, manigna, 
the native card-game, for instance, and to urge them on after their 
scanty funds are exhausted with a sweet-voiced " Don't let that worry 
you, Chico, I '11 lend you all you want. Go ahead and play," until they 
have a mortgage on " Chico's " little farm or have forced him to sign 
a contract to sell them all his coffee at half the market price. Then 
when his. fortune is made, the wily Iberian leaves each of his concubines 
and her half-breed flock of children a little hut, goes back to Spain, 
marries, and bequeaths his wealth to his legitimate offspring. Many a 
little plantation is still encumbered with these " manigua mortgages." 

To the casual observer there seems to be no color-line in 'Porto Rico ; 
but in home life and social matters there is comparatively little mingling 
of whites and blacks above the peon class. In the Agricultural College 
at Mayagiiez, for instance, this question is left entirely to the pupils. 
The students draw their own color-line. Clubs are formed that take 
in only white members, though a few of these might not pass muster 
among Americans. The colored boys do not form clubs because they 
cannot afford to do so. In the early days the teachers gave a dance 
to which all students were invited without distinction. But the darker 
youths brought up all sorts of female companions from the playa 
hovels, and the experiment was never repeated. Yet it is no unusual 
sight to see a white and a mulatto youth sharing a textbook in the shade 
of a campus mango-tree. 

There remain few strictly insular customs to distinguish Porto Rico 
from the rest of Latin-America. The native musical instrument is a 
calabash, or gourd, with a roughened surface over which a steel wire is 
rubbed, producing a half-mournful, rasping sound almost without 
cadence. Thanks perhaps to American influence, the church bells are 
musical and are rung only by day, in grateful contrast to the incessant, 
broken-boiler din of other Spanish-settled countries. The Rosario, a 
kind of native wake, consists of all-night singing by the friends and 
relatives of the recent dead. Possibly the most universal local custom 
is that of using barbed-wire fences as clothes-lines, to the misfortune 
even of the linen of trustful visitors. The panacea for all rural ills 
seems to be the tying of a white cloth about the head. Doctors seldom 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 285 

go into the country, but let the sick be brought in to them, whatever 
the stage of their illness. More than ten thousand, chiefly of the hut- 
dwelling class, died of " flu " during the winter of 1918-19, largely 
because of this inertia of physicians. 

One must not lose sight of their history in judging the present con- 
dition of the Porto Rican masses. It is only fifty years since slaves 
over sixty and under three were liberated, and later still that slavery 
was entirely abolished. No wonder the owners were glad to be rid 
of what fast breeding had made a burden, especially with free labor 
at twenty cents a day. Yet they were indemnified with eight million 
dollars from the insular revenues. Nor was servitude confined to 
Africans. Spain long used Porto Rico as a penal colony, and when 
public works no longer required them, the convicts were turned loose to 
shift for themselves. Most of them took to the mountains where 
the " poor white " population is numerous to this day. Yet the later 
generations are no more criminal than the Australians ; if there is 
much petty thieving, it is natural in a hungry, overcrowded community. 
.-The insular police established by the Americans have an efficiency 
rare in tropical countries. Their detective force rounds up a larger 
percentage of law-breakers than almost any other such body in the 
world. The insular character of their beat is to their advantage, of 
course; few Porto Ricans can swim. The island has long since been 
" cleaned up," and the unarmed stranger is safer in its remotest corners 
than on Broadway. In olden days the Porto Rican was as fond of 
making himself a walking arsenal as the Dominican; ten thousand 
revolvers were seized in nine years, and miscellaneous weapons too 
numerous to count have been confiscated and destroyed. To-day, 
except in the rare cases when a desperado like " Chuchu " breaks loose, 
or strikers grow troublesome, the spotlessly uniformed insular force 
has little to do but to enforce the unpopular laws that have come with 
American rule. 

Porto Rico voted herself dry in 1917. Three varying reasons are 
given for this unnatural action, according to the point of view of the 
speaker. Missionaries assert that, thanks largely to their work with 
the populace, the hungry rank and file determined that their children 
should not grow up under the alcoholic burden that had blasted their 
own success in life. Scoffers claim the people were misled by psycho- 
logical suggestion. The majority make the more likely assertion that 
the result was largely due to a mistake on the part of the ignorant 
peons. The " dries " chose as their party emblem the green cocoanut, 



286 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

a favorite rural beverage. Their opponents decorated the head of their 
ballot with a bottle. Now, the bottle suggests to the jibaros of the hills 
the Spaniards who keep the liquor shops, and they hate the Spaniards 
as fiercely as they are capable of hating anything. Whatever the 
workings of their obscure minds, the unshaven countrymen came down 
out of the mountains to the polls, and next morning Porto Rico woke up 
to find herself, to her unbounded surprise, " bone-dry." The mere fact 
that the politicians and the " influential citizens " almost in a body, 
and even the American governor, who saw insular revenues cut down 
when they sadly needed building up, were against the change had noth- 
ing to do with the case. Since then the insular police have confiscated 
hundreds of home-made stills and thousands of gallons of illicit liquor. 
It is rumored that they would like to indict the Standard Oil Company 
as an accessory before the fact, for virtually all the stills that languish 
in the police museum in San Juan are made of the world-wide five-gallon 
oil can, some of them ingenious in the extreme. 

Cock-fighting was forbidden by American edict soon after we took 
over the island — and in retaliation the Porto Rican Legislature forbade 
prize-fighting, even " practice bouts." But there is no law against 
keeping fighting-cocks, and where there are game-cocks there is bound 
to be fighting, at least in Latin-America. The police are on the con- 
stant look-out for clandestine rinas de gallos. One point in favor of 
the sleuths is that, though they cannot arrest people for harboring prize 
roosters, they can bring them up on the charge of cruelty to animals 
if they pick and trim the birds as proper preparation for battle re- 
quires. Americans who have lived long in Porto Rico assert that 
cock-fighting and the lottery are so indigenous to the island that there 
is little hope of really stamping them out. Indeed, even the police are 
in sympathy with the sport, though they may not let that sympathy in- 
terfere with doing their duty. High American officials sometimes ask 
what there is wrong in running a lottery, so long as other forms of 
gambling are permitted, especially as the old government lottery kept 
up many benevolences. Why, they ask, should not the poor man be 
allowed to " take a chance " as well as speculators on the stock ex- 
change? Roosters and billetes are two things that are sure to come 
back if Porto Rico wins her autonomy during the life of the present 
inhabitants. Possibly the next generation will be like-minded; one of 
the absorbing tasks of the insular police is to keep street urchins from 
gambling on the numbers of passing automobiles. 

It is not surprising that Porto Rico has more than her share of 



••■ 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 287 

juvenile offenders. Sexual morality is on a low plane in the island. 
Though there is less public vice than with us, the custom of even the 
" best citizens " to establish " outside families " is wide-spread. Even 
the " Washington of Porto Rico," who is pointed out as the model 
man of the island, always kept two or three queridas, and lost none of 
his high standing with the natives for that reason. Estate owners are 
well-nigh as free with the pretty wives of their peons as were old 
feudal lords. Women of this class are often more proud to have a son 
by the " senor " than by their own husbands. The latter are easy- 
going to a degree unknown among us ; they may be cajoled by presents 
or threatened with discharge — and where else shall they find a spot 
to live on? — or at worst they can seek consolation in the arms of their 
own queridas. The men usually acknowledge their illegal children 
without hypocrisy, but they frequently abandon them to their own 
devices. Homeless children are one of the problems of all Porto 
Rican cities ; in San German a gang of little ruffians roost in trees by 
night. The cook of an American missionary family openly gave all 
her wages, except what went for the rent of her hovel, to her " man," 
who was married to another. It was not that he demanded it ; there 
is little of the " white slave " attitude in Porto Rico, but she was proud 
to do so and it is costumbre del pais. Much as they deplored such an 
employee, the missionaries endured her, knowing only too well by 
experience that they might look farther and fare worse. Few Porto 
Ricans of the better class permit their women to go to confession, how- 
ever strictly they keep up the other forms of religion. Out of church 
the priests are frankly men like other men, and seldom have any 
hesitancy in admitting it. One famous for his pulpit eloquence brazenly 
boasts himself " the most successful lover in Porto Rico." 

It is natural that there should be a certain political unrest in Porto 
Rico. The island does not know, for instance — nor does any one else, 
apparently — whether it is a colony or a possession of the United 
States, or whether it is an integral part of it. A bit of history is 
required to explain the situation. The island was under the jurisdiction 
of Santo Domingo from its settling to the end of the sixteenth century, 
when a royal decree made it an independent colony. For a long time 
it was not self-supporting — thanks, no doubt, largely to the dishonesty 
of its governors. Its government became such a burden that Spain 
assigned a certain proportion of the treasure it was drawing from 
Mexico to support it. Incidentally this came near making Porto Rico 



■ 



288 



ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 



l 




British, for ships bringing funds from Mexico were repeatedly made 
the objects of attack, and the commander of one of these fleets once 
attempted to occupy the island, but disease among his soldiers forced 
him to abandon the enterprise, taking with him only such trophies as 
he could tear from churches and fortresses. When, a hundred years 
ago, the wave of rebellion swept over all the Spanish colonies, Santo 
Domingo declared her independence and offered to cooperate with 
Porto Rico in winning hers also; but a majority of the inhabitants 
remained loyal to the crown. In 1887 a popular assembly in Ponce, 
while acknowledging allegiance to Spain, demanded a certain measure 
of autonomy. There was danger that the Cuban insurgents would 
send an expedition to Porto Rico to join the malcontents there. Hence 
on November 28, 1897, Spain granted Porto Rico local government 
in so far as internal affairs, budgets, customs, and treaties of commerce 
were concerned. She was to have an elective legislature, an upper 
house appointed by the governor, and a cabinet composed of residents 
of the island. The following February such a cabinet was appointed, 
and on March 27 — note the date — elections were held. In other 
words Porto Rico had won autonomy without recourse to bloodshed, 
and was on the eve of exercising it when the Maine was blown up. 
Moreover, she had never in her history asked to be separated from 
Spain. 

When the Americans came, a postal system was organized, the 
government lottery was suppressed, freedom of speech and of the press 
was restored, a police force of natives under American officials was 
established, strict sanitary measures were adopted, free schools were 
opened, provision was made for the writ of habeas corpus and jury 
trials, the courts were reorganized, imprisonment for political offenses, 
chains and solitary confinement were abolished, the foreclosure of mort- 
gages was temporarily suspended, Spanish currency was replaced 
by American, local officials were elected, and a civil government was 
established on May 1, 1900. Note, however, that with all this Porto 

ico did not get as much autonomy as it had already won from Spain. 
Gradually the island has almost reached the point politically where the 
Spanish-American War found it, but meanwhile there had been much 
discontent. Then along came the " Jones bill." This provides for 
an elective legislature, extends the appointive judiciary system, admits 
a delegate to our Congress, and grants American citizenship to Porto 
Ricans. But the acts of the insular legislature must be approved by 
the American governor, and six of the heads of departments that make 




The place of pilgrimage for pious Porto Ricans 




Porto Rican children of the coast lands 







The old sugar kettles scattered through the West Indies have many uses 




A corner in Aquadillo 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 289 

up the Executive Council are Americans. The Porto Ricans chafe at 
citizenship without statehood. The island complains that it is an 
organized but not an incorporated territory of the United States. 
Though it enjoys many of the rights of territories, and a larger ex- 
emption from federal taxation than ever did any other American terri- 
tory, it is not politically happy. 

There are four political parties in Porto Rico. The Republicans, 
who have little in common with our " G. O. P.," though they send dele- 
gates to its conventions, want immediate statehood. The Unionists, 
contrary to their title, demand independence. There is a strong social- 
ist and labor party, and a minor group that desires a return to Spanish 
rule. These divisions are not so definite as they seem, if we may 
believe an unusually informative native postmaster of the interior. 

'The people with small government jobs," he asserted, "many 
school teachers among them, secretly long for independence, chiefly in 
the hope of getting more graft. The Spaniards still mix secretly in 
politics and are really indcpcndentistas, though pretending to want state- 
hood. Porto Rico would be wholly Americanized now if the gover- 
nors had not ignorantly put in anti-American politicos. There has 
really been only one competent governor since the Americans took Porto 
Rico. We are decidedly not yet ready for jury trial; there was one 
of the most serious mistakes. It was also a mistake to make us Ameri- 
can citizens collectively. We should have been given individual choice 
in the matter. Now if you accuse a man of not acting like an Ameri- 
can citizen he cries, ' Pah ! They made me an American citizen. / 
had nothing to say about it.' The best people think we need twenty 
years of military rule before we are given even local liberty. A plebi- 
scite would give a false opinion because the politicians and the small- 
estate owners, who are chiefly Spanish, would send their peons down 
to vote for independence without any notion of what it means. And 
the best class would n't vote. Do you think I would have my photo- 
graph and thumb-print taken, like a common criminal, in order to cast 
my ballot? The people do not know how to be free, after centuries 
of Spanish slavery. If independence were signed at eight o'clock to- 
morrow mornings I should leave Porto Rico at nine ! " he concluded, 
vehemently. 

There is, of course, no more reason why Porto Rico should have 
her independence than that Florida should. That she is entitled to be 
made a fully incorporated territory now, and a state in due season, 
seems the fitting course. But she is decidedly not yet ready for state- 



290 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

hood. For one thing she must first know English. The partial 
autonomy she already enjoys shows her far from prepared for self- 
rule. Uncle Sam is always in too big a hurry to give his wards local 
government ; also we listen perhaps too much to Latin-American criti- 
cism. We are not used to the sob-eloquence of the race, which at 
bottom means very little. The legislature and native insular officials 
are by no means free from intrigue, graft, and dishonesty. Towns 
with $100,000 incomes spend half of it in salaries to the mayor and 
his colleagues. Teachers were forced to pay ten per cent, of their 
wages into political funds, and the native court found that " they can 
do what they wish with their salaries." The great socialist senator 
himself, rumor has it, bought land in Santurce at a dollar an acre, had 
public streets put in, and sold out at three dollars, though that, to be 
sure, might have happened in Trenton or Omaha. Even the post- 
offices are said to be corrupt with local politics. 

So long as there is a great apathetic, illiterate, emotional mass of 
voters self-government can be no more than a farce, in Porto Rico 
or elsewhere. No Anglo-Saxon party leader can hope to keep pace 
with the suave machinations of Spanish-American politicians. They 
can think of more tricks overnight than he can run to earth in a week. 
Some years ago a youthful American was approached by a Porto 
Rican political leader with a request to come and address a public 
meeting. 

" But I don't know a word of Spanish ! " he protested. 

" All the better," replied the politician ; " we want you to speak in 
English." 

" I never made a speech in my life," continued the American. 

" Talk about anything whatever," pleaded the other, " the weather, 
the scenery, baseball." 

The youth, who was not averse to a " lark," mounted the platform 
and began to expound in choppy words the glories of baseball. At 
the end of each sentence the politician silenced him with a gesture and 
" interpreted " his statements to the crowded peons, who, to the speak- 
er's astonishment, greeted each well-rounded Spanish phrase with howls 
of delight. Not until the meeting was over and one of his hearers had 
addressed him by a name that was not his own, did the youth awaken 
to the fact that he had been introduced as the son of the governor, and 
that the Spanish portion of his speech had been an explanation of how 
anxious his " father " was to have the " interpreter " elected to the 



I 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 291 

office he sought. "Dice el americano (the American says) " is still 
one of the by-words of Porto Rican politics. 

But after all one does not visit so beautiful and fascinating a country 
as Porto Rico to chatter of its problems, but to meet its curious people 
and to marvel at its glorious scenery. More mountainous than even JL^^ 
Haiti and Santo Domingo, the island is such an unbroken labyrinth | 
of hills, ranges, and high peaks, of deep valleys, perpendicular slopes, / 
and precipitous canyons, that its rugged beauty seems never-ending. 
That beauty, too, is enhanced by the great amount of cultivation, by 
the character it gains over the often uninhabited island to the west- 
ward in being everywhere peopled, by the great variety of colors that 
decorate it especially in this tropical spring-time of February. Even 
along the rolling coastal belt the highways are lined with the green- and 
red-leaved almendras, or false almond-trees, which here and there carpet 
the roads with Turkish rugs of fallen leaves. Higher up comes the 
roble, or flowering laurel, with its masses of delicate pink blossoms, 
then the bucare-trees, used as coffee shade, daub the precipitous hill- 
sides with splotches of burnt-orange hue ; still farther aloft come 
beautiful tree ferns, symbolical of high tropical altitudes, and every- 
where stand the majestic royal palms and the dense, massive mango- 
trees, in sorrel-colored blossom at this season, to crown the heavy green 
vegetation that everywhere clothes the island. For although almost f 
every acre of it was denuded of its native forest growth by the tree- 
hating Spaniards, nature and the necessities of man have replaced its 
unbroken verdure. 

It would be hard to say which of the several splendid roads across 
the island offers the best glimpse of this .gj^aa^^airyland. Some swear $,..., W/ 
by the Ponce-Arecibo route, through the magnificent Utuado valley; %i^ : 
others find nothing to compare with the stretch between Comerio and 
Cayey, the heart of the tobacco district; the most traveled certainly is 
the great military highway of the Spaniards, from San Juan to Ponce, 
the first half of it rivalled now by an American-built branch through 
Barranquitas. Perhaps the most beautiful bit of all is the journey 
from Guayama up to Cayey, that, too, by a route that antedates our 
possession. One unconsciously compares these achievements of the old 
Spanish engineers with our more recent efforts, and the comparison is 
not always favorable to the Americans. The Spaniard built in that 
leisurely fashion of European highways, which prefers wide detours 



292 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

to over-steep grades ; his successor here and there betrays the impatience 
of his race by a too abrupt turn or a sharper slope. Yet the works of 
both are splendidly engineered, with never a really dangerous spot to a 
sane driver, for all t]ie4iajrpin... curves, the precipitous mountain walls 
above and below, the lofty bridges over profound canyons at the bot- 
tom of which insignificant brooks meander or roaring torrents tear 
seaward as if fleeing from the wrath of the towering peaks above, 
according to the season. There are reminders of Europe at every 
turn, — crenelated bridge-parapets, kilometer-posts and white frac- 
tions of them at every hundred meters, squatting men wielding their 
hammers on roadside stone-piles, caminero huts every few miles. It 
is the latter, in particular, that explain the unfailing near-perfection of 
Porto Rican highways. Brick or stone dwellings for the capataces, 
or road foremen, who must proceed at once to any broken roadbed, 
rain or shine, are interspersed with the too miserable huts of the peones 
camincros, who toil unceasingly day after day in the up-keep of the 
highways, like scattered railroad section-gangs. This system, a direct 
legacy from Spain, would be the answer to our own road troubles, were 
it possible to find men in our country willing to spend their lives at low 
wages in such an occupation. 

Travel is unceasing along .these splendid island roads. Automobiles, 
creaking ox-carts and massive tarpaulin-covered freight wagons drawn 
by several teams of big Missouri mules, mail-busses and crowded 
guaguas, horse carriages and now and then a string of pack-animals 
to contrast with the flying motors, make endless procession along the 
way, while countless barefoot pedestrians flank the blurred roadsides. 
Only the horsemen so frequent elsewhere in Latin-America are con- 
\ spicuous by their scarcity. In contrast to carefully tended highways 
tare the constant successions of miserable huts, built of anything that 
|will hold together, some of them so close to the precipitous edge of 
the road that the front yard sometimes comes tumbling down into it 
m the rainy season. Others are pitched up the mountain sides to the 
clouds above, many of the slopes so sheer that the little garden patches 
stand almost on end. A case once actually came to court of a man 
who sued his neighbor for pushing his cow off his farm, entailing great 
labor to hoist her up again. Little American-style schoolhouses, the 
Stars and Stripes always flying above them, the whole interior from 
teacher to pupils visible through the wide-open doors, flash past. 
Lounging men are frequent, women everywhere making lace or drawn- 
work squat like toads in the doorways of their patched hovels, no one 









WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 293 

of which is insignificant or inaccessible enough not to have the census- 
enumerator's tag tacked in plain sight on its bare front wall. 

From Guayamja almost at sea-level the old Spanish carretera climbs 
quickly into the cooler air, in snaky fashion, the town and the cane- 
green valley below diminishing to a picture framed by the white 
beach-line and the fuzzy mountain-slopes, then mounts by tortuous 
curves and serpentine loops around the brinks of dizzy precipices to a 
height of three thousand feet. For a time it clings along the cliff of a 
magnificent little valley, giving an endless succession of vistas, pano- 
ramas of mountains, ravines, and forested slopes, enhanced by frequent 
glimpses of the deep-blue Caribbean. No one of these highways is 
twice alike ; morning or evening, under the blazing tropical sun or 
veiled with mountain showers, there is always a different aspect. 
Then suddenly it bursts out high above the valley of Cayey, the roof- 
flecked red of the town surrounded and packed as far as the eye can 
see with cloth-covered tobacco-fields, the crowning beauty of Porto 
Rican scenery. As we drop downward by more hairpin curves and 
climb again into the hills beyond, the steep mountainsides are every- 
where covered in enormous patches with what look like the snowfields 
and glaciers of Switzerland, transported to the tropics. All through 
the region the big unpainted wooden barns of the American Tobacco 
Company bulk above the shade-grown immensities, as if half buried 
by drifted snow, until the entranced beholder finds it hard to remember 
that he is in a land of perpetual summer, despite the royal palms that 
here and there spring aloft from the white landscape. Elsewhere the 
unclothed fields are planted in endless rows of tobacco, on, up, and 
over hill after mountain, some of them so steep as to make cultivation 
seem impossible, and all looking as if their velvety green fur had 
been put in order by a gigantic comb. 

Here one meets wagon-loads of tobacco plants and men carrying 
them in baskets on their heads, tiny plants in the transplanting season, 
great clusters of the full-grown leaves in cutting-time. He is a simple 
fellow, the stubby-footed toiler of these regions, so naive that he often 
tucks away for years the checks with which the company pays for his 
produce, instead of cashing them. They are always "good," he argues, 
and easily concealed, and he seems never to have heard of the word 
interest. 

" Where does all this stuff go ? " demanded an American tourist who 
had been motoring for hours through these tropical glaciers, " I have 
never seen much Porto Rican tobacco in the States." 



294 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

" Ah, but when it reaches New York it becomes Habana," explained 
the tobacco agent. " You see, we mix it with the Cuban." 

" About one leaf of Habana to a bale of this," suggested the tourist. 
" Well, something like that," admitted the tobacco-man. 

The holy place of Porto Rico — for it would be a strange Latin- 
American country without one — is the old church of Hormigueros, 
a yellow church high on a hill, conspicuous afar off and with the in- 
evitable cane of the coast lands stretching away from it as far as the 
pilgrim can see. The pious still climb its great stone stairway on their 
hands and knees, though rarely now except during the big fiesta in 
September. The story is that, some time back in the days of legend, 
a bull attacked a man in the field below. The man prayed to the Virgin, 
promising to do something in her honor if she would save him, and 
at the very instant his life was about to be gored out the bull dropped 
dead at his feet. There is a colored picture of that miracle in the 
church on the hill, which was built by the grateful man, who also en- 
tailed the estate he owned below to support it in perpetuity. To-day 
the lands are producing sugar cane for the Guanica Central, which pays 
rent to the church — and which also hastens to contribute when the 
parish priest suggests that money is needed for a fiesta or for some 
other purpose. For if the company does not respond, the priest calls 
a holiday, digging up some old saint out of the church calendar, and 
the fields round about go begging for laborers. 

There is at least one other " sight " which the visitor to Porto Rico 
should not miss, for it throws a striking side-light on Latin-American 
character. In the hilly little town of Barranquitas is the birth-place 
of Luis Mufioz Rivera, often called the " George Washington of Porto 
Rico." A cheap, thin, little clapboarded building, uninviting by our 
standards, though almost palatial to the simple country people, it has 
been turned into a museum to the dead insular hero, such a museum 
as cannot often be seen elsewhere. At the back of the house a lean-to 
garage has been built to accommodate the expensive touring-car in 
which his remains were carried to the cemetery. Not that Rivera 
owned an automobile ; he was too honest a servant of his country to 
have reached that degree of affluence. It was loaned for the funeral 
by one of the dead man's admirers, a senator and the owner of a large 
sugar central. When the mourners returned, it was decided to make a 
Porto Rican " Mount Vernon "of the humble residence of the departed I 
statesman, to which end the rich senator not only contributed generously 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 295 

in money, but added the improvised funeral-car. There it stands to 
this day, its brand new tires lifted off the garage floor by wooden 
horses, the license of four years ago still on its blunt nose, the plank 
framework that was built out the back of it to hold the coffin still 
intact. Inside the house is the narrow spring cot on which the hero 
died, covered with those poetically lettered purple ribbons of which the 
Latin-American mourner is so fond, and a score of other belongings, 
similarly decorated. These include a tin bathtub on wheels, a leather 
valise, the high-hat box indispensable to diplomats, several photographs 
of the deceased, death-masks of his face and of his hands, his last 
umbrella — one almost expects to find his last toothbrush, with a purple 
bow on the handle — all of them more or less covered with cobwebs. 
On his writing-table lies a specially bound volume of his book of poems, 
called " Tropicales," and, most striking tribute of all, an elaborate bit 
of embroidery done in the various shaded hair of his female admirers. 

Rivera differed from most politicians in being strictly honest. Not 
only did he live within his government salary ; he gave a large share 
of it to the poor. Bit by bit hatchet-and-cherry-tree stories are already 
growing up about his memory. As the leader of the Unionist party 
he was violently anti-American, went to the United States to fight for 
the independence of the island — and came back ardently pro-American. 
His admirers assert that " he would have been the salvation of Porto 
Rico had he lived," though exactly what they mean by the statement 
they probably have little notion themselves. 

There are two drawbacks to walking in Porto Rico, though the ardent 
pedestrian will not let them deter him from his favorite sport. For 
one thing an American attracts attention, and loses the incognito that 
makes walking in Europe, for instance, so pleasant. Then the roads 
are too good. The hard macadam surfaces which are the, joy of the 
motorist are not soft underfoot, and the rushing automobiles have 
small respect for the mere foot-traveler. There are, of course, many 
unpaved trails in and over the mountains, but they were scarcely pass- 
able at the time of our visit, for Porto Rico seems to have no definitely 
fixed wet and dry season. 

I rambled about several sections of the island on foot. There was 
the trip to and about Lares, for instance, in the heart of the coffee 
district. The men of the over-developed big toes are less in touch with 
the outside world than either the cane or tobacco planters. The coffee 
industry is the only one that suffered by the island's change of sov- 



296 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ereignty. Though it was not introduced into Porto Rico until more 
than two centuries after the sugar-cane, the Arabian berry was the king 
of the island when General Miles landed the first American troops at 
Guanica. The loss of their free markets in Spain and Cuba, however, 
caused the coffee men to succumb under a discouragement from which 
they have not wholly recovered to this day. It is this, no doubt, which 
accounts for the careless methods of the cafetales, where jungle, weeds, 
and parasites often choke the bushes, while the berries are dried on 
half -cured cowhides laid in the open streets or on hut floors, with 
chickens, dogs, goats, and naked children, to say nothing of pigs, 
wandering over them at will. Such conditions will of course improve 
when the United States, the greatest coffee-drinking nation on the 
globe, finally learns that a berry equal to any in the world can be 
produced on American soil. 

In Lares region the crop is taken a bit more seriously. There are 
brick coffee-floors in many a yard, and the bushes cover even the crests 
of the mountains, though the stranger might not suspect it, hidden as 
they are by the sheltering trees. They are pretty in their white blos- 
soms in the February season, and the bucare trees flame forth every- 
where on the steep slopes. The Spaniards, who own many of the 
estates, pay fifty cents " flat " a day to their peons. The more gener- 
ous Porto Rican growers, if their own assertions may be taken at par, 
pay sixty cents, with the right to eat the oranges and guineos, or small 
bananas, that fall from the trees, the rent-free possession of an acre 
of ground on which to build a hut and graze a cow, a pig, or a few 
chickens, and plant a garden, and such free firewood as may be picked 
up on the estate. Formerly they paid thirty cents and gave two meals 
a day, but the cost of food has caused them to " advance " wages in- 
stead. The women and girls of the region spend most of their time 
making lace or drawn-work, as elsewhere, unless they are attracted to 
the cafetales in picking season by the higher inducement of forty cents 
a day. 

I paused to talk with a youth who kept a roadside " shop." It con- 
sisted of a few plantain leaves and pieces of boxes laid together into 
a kind of shelter and counter. He rarely made a half-dollar daily 
profit, he admitted, but that was all he could earn in the coffee fields, 
and there he wore out his shoes, which cost much money. He was ai 
ardent friend of Americans, like many of the country people. Asked 
to explain his friendship, he based it chiefly on the fact that they re- 
quired the police to speak politely to everyone, did not allow beating, 




Si -C 




/ 



o 







A procession of strikers in honor of representatives of the A. F. L. 



U 'Z&- W 








'How many of you are on strike?" asked Senator Iglesias 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 297 

and punished their own people as well as Porto Ricans, whereas the 
Spaniards always used to be let off free. Then the Americans gave 
free schools. He had gone to one himself, " but he was not given 
to learn." It is a familiar refrain all over Porto Rico, even from 
persons who have every outward evidence of being bright as our 
average. Doctors say there is a special reason for this backwardness. 

The peons of the region, silent-footed, listless, are often pure 
Caucasian in type ; indeed their pasty-white complexions frequently 
contrast with the tanned faces of northern visitors. Now and again 
one wanders by looking startlingly like a three-day corpse. They are 
victims of the hookworm. There is more hookworm in Porto Rico, 
those who should know tell us, than in any other country on the globe, 
with the possible exception of India and Ceylon. The disease was 
brought by African slaves — along with most of the troubles of the 
West Indies — and while it does little harm to negroes, it is often 
fatal to the whites. The population in the rural areas makes no sani- 
tary provisions, and soil pollution is wide-spread; they invariably go 
barefooted, with the result to be expected. Ninety per cent, of the 
laboring class was infected with hookworm when we took over the 
island. An active campaign was waged at once and had good results, 
but with partial autonomy the populace has fallen back almost into its 
first pitiable condition. The Rockefeller Foundation has recently of- 
fered three fourths of the preliminary expense of a new attack on the 
disease, if the insular government will bear the rest. For the cure is 
simple ; it only requires persistence. Drafted soldiers were treated for 
it, and one may easily detect the superiority in energy of the camineros 
and laborers who are still to be seen in remnants of their old uniforms. 
In a way it is Porto Rico's most serious problem. Even a light infec- 
tion causes serious mental retardation, and much money that is spent 
on schools is lost because of this defective mentality. 

The hookworm is troublesome chiefly in the rural districts. The 
poor of the cities, who are bread eaters, have sprue instead. Of late 
only certified yeast from the United States has been permitted on the 
island ; moreover, sprue may be cured by vaccination. A more serious 
thing is the prevalence of " t. b." — which missionaries on the island 
dub " tin box." Since the Americans came, there has been a constant 
increase in zinc roofs and sheet-iron houses over the old open-as-wool 
thatch hovels, and as the countryman persists in closing by night even 
the single tiny window, like that in the end of a box-car, up under the 
eaves of his shacks, weak lungs are increasing. 



298 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Fruit is abundant along the roads of Porto Rico. Mere bananas 
are so plentiful that they are often abandoned to the goats and pigs; 
in Lares a man with a wheelbarrow full of them was selling the largest 
and best at seven cents a dozen. Wild oranges, sweet, and juicy, for 
all their seeds, line the highways in what seems quan''ty sufficient to 
supply the entire demands of the " Mainland." Most of them never 
reach the market. Here and there one runs across a crude packing- 
house among the hills, but the fact that a box containing an average 
of one hundred and fifty oranges, picked, sorted, crated, and hauled to 
the coast, sells for fifty cents answers the natural query. In the trade 
these are known as " east-side oranges," and are generally sold by 
pushcart men in- the tenement districts of our large cities — at how 
many hundred per cent, increase in price purchasers may figure out for 
themselves. 

Vegetable growing has never been favored by the inhabitants of our 
strictly agricultural little West Indian possession. Like all Latin- 
Americans, they are content to do as their forefathers have done, and 
stick to the yams, yautias, and names, a coarse species of sweet potato, 
which grow almost wild, and will have nothing to do with Yankee 
innovations, though radishes mature in twelve days, and even Irish 
potatoes may be grown in the higher altitudes, and the market price of 
such vegetables is high. Bit by bit the jibaros may be coaxed to im- 
prove their opportunities. Clusters of bee-hives are already common 
sights in the island, which can be said of no other section of tropical 
America. The Federal Agricultural Experimental Station at Mayagiiez 
is to be thanked for this improvement. The old legend that bees lose 
their custom of laying up honey after a few seasons in a winterless 
land was found to be a fallacy, though they mix with the wild black 
bees of the island and the queens have to be killed and replaced period- 
ically to keep the swarms from following the example of tropical man 
and refusing duty. Dyewoods, cabinet woods, and timber for building 
are wholly lacking in Porto Rico. Imported lumber costs $100 a 
thousand square feet. No wonder huts are made of yagna, thatch, and 
odds and ends. Indeed, the Federal institution mentioned above finds 
it can get better lumber out of packing-boxes than it can buy on the 
island. Porto Rico's peculiar condition, a tropical country in which 
practically all that the people produce is shipped out of the country, 
and nearly all they consume shipped in, -makes eventual improvement 
of these conditions imperative. It strikes the casual observer as ex- 
traordinary, for instance, that there are no large manufacturing in- 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 299 

dustries on the island, with its excellent sources of water-power and 
its unlimited supply of cheap labor. 

I drifted out along the road from Aguadilla southward one day. 
The first man to arouse my interest was a little peon caminero clearing 
the highway edge of weeds, who was so pretty he would have made a 
charming bride in proper garments. His wages were $27.60 a month. 
He rented a "house" at $1.50 monthly, so large a house because he 
kept his wife's mother and two sisters, " for they have no other shel- 
ter." He said it casually, as one epeaks of the weather, without the 
faintest hint of the boasting an American of his class could scarcely 
divorce from such a statement. A bit farther on a diseased old beggar 
sat on the edge of the road, the bottom of the dirty old straw hat on the 
ground before him sprinkled with copper cents — " chavos," they call 
them in Porto Rico, though the beggars soften their appeal by using the 
diminutive " chavito." There is a suggestion of India in the island's 
prevalence of alms-seekers, — blind men led by a boy or a dog, dis- 
tressing old women publicly displaying their ailments, cripples and 
monstrosities wailing for sympathy from the passer-by. Scarcity of 
land and employment, abetted by the bad Latin-American custom of 
giving alms indiscriminately even to children, has brought a plague 
of professional beggars. One such fellow in Mayagiiez has pleaded 
himself into possession of a twenty-acre fine a — and is still begging. 
A mendicant of San German complains that the time-table is so badly 
arranged that he has to run to meet two trains. An American medical 
missionary offered to remove the cataracts from his eyes free of charge, 
but he declined to have his means of livelihood cut off. One of our 
Porto Rican hosts was responding to the appeal of an old woman for 
a " chavito " when a boy rushed up and cried, " Don't give her any- 
thing, seiior, she has a cow ! " The crone dashed after the urchin with 
an astonishing burst of speed, and returned out of breath to wail, " It 
is true, caballero, I admit it is true. But I have no pasture, and I must 
beg now to support the cow." 

A long row of men were hoeing new sugarcane for the " Central 
Coloso," the tall stack of which broke the almost flat horizon behind 
them. They watched my approach, plainly suspicious that any man 
wearing shoes might be a company spy, and worked with redoubled 
energy. They were paid $1.50 for a nine-hour day, except two who 
were " sick " and a boy of seventeen, at two thirds that amount, and the 
capatas, who differed from the others only by the lack of a hoe, at 



300 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

$1.80. As I turned away, the latter asked in a soft voice if I could tell 
him the time. Then he drew from his pocket an Ingersoll watch and, 
apologizing for his atrevemiento ("daring"), requested me to show 
him how to set it, the men under him at the same time protesting that 
" he should not make so bold with gentlemen." A stout, pure-white 
peon patching the road farther on, snatched off his hat as I spoke to 
him. His wages had gone up during the past year — from seventy- 
three to eighty cents a day ! But he could earn little more than half 
that in the coffee estates at home, so he had been glad to come down 
to the coast to work. I drifted upon and strolled for a while along 
the railroad. The section hands were getting a dollar a day, which 
sets Porto Rico thirty years back in that regard, for I remember that 
like wages were paid then on the branch line that passed my birthplace. 
Perhaps the island's laborers earn no more than they receive ; a gang 
of ten men were loading a cane-cart in a neighboring field a single 
cane at a time. The two old women who were picking up rubbish 
beyond them had never been married, but they had three and four 
children respectively. They had always been paid forty cents a day, 
but now they had been promised a dollar. Whtther or not they would 
get it only pay-day could tell. They accepted with alacrity the cigar- 
ettes I offered. At noon I stepped into a shop-dwelling to ask for 
food. The lunch that was finally prepared would not have over-fed a 
field laborer, yet the cost was eighty cents. The family was moderately 
clean, and energetic above the average. The four children all went 
to school. On the wall of the poor little hovel, surrounded on all sides 
by cane-fields, the oldest boy had chalked in English, " We have no 
sugar because we have sent it all to the poor people of Europe." 

Along the soft-dirt private road to the central I met an intelligent 
looking man of thirty or so, capable in appearance as any American 
mechanic, Caucasian of race, his hair already turning gray. He begged 
for a peseta. I opened my mouth to ask why a big, strong fellow in 
the prime of life should be asking for alms, when my eyes fell upon 
his left-leg. It was swollen to the knee with elephantiasis, both the 
trouser-leg and the skin having burst with the expansion. A year ago, 
he said, he had been out on a Sunday excursion in the country, and 
had stopped to wash his feet in a creek. They smarted a bit on the 
way home, but he thought nothing of it until, some time later, his left 
foot began to swell. He was a cigar-maker by trade, and the Sanidad 
had refused to let him work in such a condition, yet the government 
would not take care of him. So he wandered about the country, where 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 301 

the people were more kindly than in the towns. The leg did not 
exactly hurt any more, but it seemed to drag all his left side down with 
its weight. He would gladly go and have it cut off, if he could find 
a place to have it done, though people said even that would not do 
much good. Tears were near the brim of his eyes, but they did not 
well over. Hopeless cases of this kind seem much more pitiful when 
one can talk to the sufferer and find him a rational human being, of 
some education, than when they are merely the dog-like wretches of 
India, who seem scarcely capable of thought. 

One morning I stepped off the night train to Ponce and struck out 
across the island by the Utuado road. It was an hour before I had 
emerged from the populous suburbs of the town. Automobiles snorted 
past without once offering a " lift." Not that I wanted one, but one 
gets an impression of selfishness in a community that passes a foot- 
traveler without a suggestion of help. It was not universal here, how- 
ever. Before I had climbed a mile into the foot-hills a man in a rattle- 
trap buggy pulled his packages together in the seat and invited me to 
jump in. It was hard to explain my refusal. There were many little 
wayside " restaurants " where one would least expect any demand for 
such accommodations. But people must win a livelihood somehow, as 
one of the keepers explained. Then came a string of " villas," of 
Porto Ricans, Americans, and a few Englishmen, modest little summer 
homes set where they could look down the valley upon the blue Carib- 
bean. Here and there were the creeper-grown ruins of old Spanish 
country houses. Finally — a joke? I hardly think so, for the Latin- 
American countryman has as little sarcasm as sense of humor — a 
miserable little tin hut, in the yard of which the owner and his boy 
were forking manure, was elaborately announced in large letters as 
" Villa Providencia." 

At the first miriametro-post the coffee began, bananas and guayaba- 
trees shading it. There passed much freight in tarpaulin-covered 
wagons, the big brakes badly worn. A crowded guagua rumbled by, 
the chauffeur and most of the passengers staring at me with an air 
that said plainly, " Look at that stingy amcricano saving money by 
walking ! " Staring is universal in Porto Rico, at least outside the 
larger cities. Even the " schoolmarms," always well-dressed in spot- 
less but cheap materials, pause in their lessons to gaze at the sight that 
has drawn the pupils' attention. 

Three hours up I had an extended view of the Caribbean, still seem- 
ing barely a rifle-shot way. A boy of eight, living a few yards from 



3 02 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

a school, had never attended it, " because he had to take care of a sick 
mare at home." In the hovel-store where I had lunch three little girls 
read English to me from their textbooks. I could understand them, 
but only by giving their curious pronunciation the closest attention. Of 
the information in their Spanish textbooks they had a moderate knowl- 
edge for their years. The houses were constant ; one was never out of 
human sight or sound. The scarcity of dogs was in contrast to other 
Latin-American countries; during an outbreak of bubonic plague some 
years ago seven thousand were killed in Ponce alone. In a spot where 
the roadside grew precipitous a sad-eyed peon stood looking at the little 
garden before his house, which had fallen into the highway, more than 
fifty feet below, during the night's rain. Higher still the road reached 
its point of greatest altitude and descended, more or less abruptly, 
through artistic tree-ferns and clumps of bamboo to Adjuntas. All 
I remember of the flat little town are the oranges heaped up at the 
roadside, the drying coffee laid out on burlap sacks before the sleepy 
little shops, and that " Ponce de Leon Brothers " kept one of the 
clothing stores. 

Many big auto-trucks were carrying bags of coffee in the direction 
of Ponce, as others like them carry tobacco from the region of tropical 
glaciers. The road forded a river, but so many stepping-stones had 
been laid across it that I needed to take off only one shoe. A new 
highway to Lares chewed its way upward into the almost chalky hills 
to the left. We certainly build good roads in Porto Rico; the Spanish 
influence seems to have survived the change of sovereignty. The high- 
way under my feet followed a rock-tumbled river all the rest of the 
day. Census-tags decorated every hut. The enumerators did not skip 
their political opponents, as in Cuba, and though the date had passed 
after which the tags might be removed, not one of them had been 
touched. Most of the people could not read the printed permission to 
do so; besides, they would not dream of meddling in a government 
matter. Sunset came early between the mountain walls piled high 
above me on either side. Then fell the quick darkness of the tropics, 
and there began a constant creaking that suggested young frogs. For 
an hour I plodded on into the warm night, the road barely visible under 
a crescent moon, in the faint rays of which the feathery bamboos that 
lined the highway for a mile or more before reaching Utuado, looked 
weirdly like faintly moving gigantic fans. 

Utuado is a large town for its situation, and piled up the first slopes 
of the hills about it in a stage-setting effect. Dense masses of fog — 



WANDERING ABOUT BORINQUEN 303 

strange sight in the West Indies, where the fog-horn never breaks the 
slumber of sea passengers — lay in its very streets until the tropical 
sun wiped them away toward nine. Great precipices of lime-stone on 
either side, a boiling river below, mountains of bold broken outline 
ahead, marked the journey onward. The road climbed frequently, 
even though it followed the growing river. Patches of tobacco, as well 
as coffee, covered the steep hillsides; vegetation and mankind were 
everywhere. Here and there the highway clung by its fingernails and 
eyebrows, as sailors say, along the face of the cliff. Then it regained 
solid footing and broke out into a broad, flat coastland, hot, dusty, and 
uninteresting, with cane and smoke-belching sugar-mills, and hurried 
across it to Atlantic-washed Arecibo. 



CHAPTER XIII 

IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 

'"~W~"T'S all I can do to keep from barking at you," said a passenger 
on the Virginia, as he crawled on hands and knees from one of 
JL the four kennels that decorate her afterdeck. As a matter of fact, 
we all did a certain amount of growling before the voyage was over. 
Yet the four of us who had won the kennels were lucky dogs compared 
to the unfortunate dozen or more who had to snatch what sleep they 
could curled up on the bare deck or in a single sour-smelling cabin below, 
where neither color, sex nor seasickness knew any distinction. 

The weakest link in the shipping chain down the West Indies is 
that between our own possessions. Once a week a little schooner that 
was built to defend America's yachting championship, but which never 
reached the finals, raises its wings in San Juan harbor and, the winds 
willing, drops a flock of disgruntled passengers, the United States mails, 
and an assorted cargo in St. Thomas and St. Croix in time to return for 
a similar venture seven days later. Congressional committees, of 
course, have their battleships, and the white-uniformed governors of our 
Virgin Islands their commodious steam-yacht; but the mere garden va- 
riety of tax-paying citizen has the privilege of tossing about for several 
days on the Virginia, subsisting on such food as he has had the fore- 
sight to bring with him, and drinking such lukewarm water as he can 
coax from the schooner's cask. 

It is nearly fifty miles from Porto Rico to St. Thomas. All day long 
our racing yacht crawled along the coast, San Juan and the island's 
culminating peak, El Yunque, equally immovable on the horizon, while 
the half-grown crew alternated between pumping water from the hold 
and playfully disobeying the orders of the forceless old mulatto captain. 
Nine at night found us opposite Fajardo light — more than an hour 
by automobile from our starting-point ! While the crew slept, without 
so much as posting a lookout, a boy of thirteen sat at the wheel, and 
the kennelless passengers tossed restlessly on their chosen deck spots. 
A half -grown pig — the only traveler on board whose ticket specified 
ship's food — wandered disconsolately fore and aft, now and then 

304 




The new church of Guayama, Porto Rico 




A Porto Rican ex-soldier working as road peon. He gathers the grass with a wooden 
hook and cuts it with a small sickle 




„ -« I k t k k k k k kj 






Porto Rican tobacco fields 




Charlotte Amalia, capital of our Virgin Islands 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 305 

demanding admission to one or another of the four " cabins." No 
doubt he recognized them as built for his own, rather than the human, 
species. 

Sunrise overtook us still within sight of Porto Rico, but with her 
dependencies of Culebra and Vieques abeam, and the hazy mass of the 
Virgin group visible on the horizon ahead. Brown, rugged, strangely 
aged-looking, Culebra showed no signs of life except the lighthouse set 
upon its highest cliff. Vieques, on the other hand, known to English- 
speaking mariners as " Crab Island," is a diminutive replica of Porto 
Rico, with four large sugar-mills and a population of some eleven 
thousand, American citizens all. The Danes once claimed this also, 
but Spanish buccaneers established the more efficacious right of actual 
possession, and at length the Porto Rican Government sent an expedi- 
tion to annex it to the Spanish crown. 

With monotonous deliberation the Virgin group grew in size and 
visibility. St. Thomas and St. John took on individuality amid their 
flock of rocky keys, and British Tortola gradually asserted its aloofness 
from the American islands. Far off on the blue-gray horizon we could 
even make out St. Croix, like a stain on the inverted bowl of sky. 
Yet, though the breeze was strong, it was a head wind, and the ocean 
current sweeping in from the eastward held us all but motionless when 
we seemed to be cutting swiftly through the light waves. For five 
profane hours we tacked to and fro within gunshot of a towering white 
boulder jutting forth from the sea, and fittingly known as Sail Rock, 
without seeming to advance a mile on our journey. 

We turned the isolated precipice at last, and headed in toward moun- 
tainous St. Thomas. Neither its scattered keys nor its long broken 
coast-line showed any evidence of habitation, but at length three white 
specks appeared on its water's edge, and grew with the afternoon to a 
semblance of Charlotte Amalie, a city rivaled in its beauty, at a dis- 
tance, by few others even in the beautiful West Indies. We greeted it 
with fervent exclamations of delight, piled up white and radiant in the 
moonlight on its three hills, like occupants of royal boxes at some gala 
performance in its amphitheatrical harbor below. Scarcely a sound 
came from it, however, except the languid swish of the waves on 
what seemed to be the base of its lower houses, as we dropped anchor 
near midnight within rowboat distance of the wharves.. It had been an 
unusually swift voyage, according to the uncommanding captain, a mere 
two days instead of the four or five it frequently requires. 

In due course of time a negro youth rowed out to examine us. He 



306 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

was an exceedingly courteous negro, to be sure, his white uniform was 
spotless, and his English impeccable ; but there was something incon- 
gruous in the fact that American citizens must have his permission to 
be admitted into one American possession from another. The " Grand 
Hotel," which virtually monopolizes the accommodation of transients 
in St. Thomas, could not house us, or rather, on second thought, it 
could, if we would be contented in the "annex " over a barber-shop 
across the street. Its creaking floors were unbroken expanses of 
spaciousness, but at least there was a mahogany four-poster in one 
corner. We sat down on it with a sigh of contentment — and quickly 
stood up again, under the impression that we had inadvertently sat 
upon the floor. The Virgin Islands have not yet reached that decadent 
degree of civilization that requires bed-springs. As to a bath — cer- 
tainly, it should be brought at once; and a half hour later a loose- 
kneed negro wandered in and set down on the floor, with the rattle of 
a hardware-shop in a tornado, a large tin pan, red with rust. All we 
had to do, explained the ultra-courteous octoroon manager, was to call 
another negro to bring a pail of water when — and the emphasis sug- 
gested that the time was still far off — we " desired to perform our 
ablutions." The tub-bearer was evidently too worn out from his extra- 
ordinary exertion to indulge in another before he had taken time to 
recuperate. 

That loose-kneed stroll of the Virgin-Islander is typical of all his 
processes, mental, moral, or physical. It is not merely slow, rythmical, 
and dignified; there is in it a suggestion of limitless wealth, an un- 
troubled conscience, and an ancestry devoted to leisurely pursuits for 
untold generations. In local parlance a " five minutes' walk " means a 
block. One must not even speak hastily to a native, for the only result 
is wasted breath and the necessity of repeating the question in more 
measured cadences. Politeness oozes from his every pore ; " at your 
sarvice, sar," and " only too glad to be of use, ma'am," interlard every 
conversation ; but any attempt, courteous or otherwise, to hurry the 
Virgin Islander brings a sullen resentment which you will never 
succeed in smiling away. As the navy men who are governing 
him put it in the technical vernacular of their calling, he has only two 
speeds,— " Slow Ahead " and " Stop." 

Once the visitor has shaken off the no doubt ridiculous notion that 
things should be done in a hurry, or done at all, for that matter, he will 
find our newly adopted children an amusing addition to the family. 
Like all negroes in contact with civilization, they are fond of four- 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 307 

jointed words where monosyllables would suffice, and of pompous, 
rounded sentences in place of brief-to-the-point statements. " Pres- 
ently " means "now " ; " He detained from coming " is the local form of 
" he can't come." Talking is one of the Virgin Islanders' chief recrea- 
tions. They buttonhole the unknown passerby and unburden them- 
selves to him at endless length, ceaselessly chattering on until he can 
forge some excuse to tear himself away, when they hasten to ask their 
friends if they, too, have seen " the stranger with the beard," " the 
American who arrived last night," " that rich-looking gentleman in a 
white helmet," that the friends may not lose their chance of waylaying 
the victim who is already listening to a new monologue around the 
corner. If they can not find a hearer, they do not for that reason 
abandon their favorite sport; it is commonplace to meet a pedestrian, 
particularly a woman, chattering volubly to herself as she shuffles along 
the street. 

Their lack of self-restraint is on a par with their loquacity. When 
the first navy hydroplanes flew into the harbor, the entire population 
became a screaming mob of neck-craning, pointing, shoulder-clapping, 
occupation-forgetting children. The winner of a dollar at the local 
" horse " races, in which the island donkeys are now and then pitted 
against one another, may be seen turning somersaults in the midst 
of the crowd, or throwing himself on the ground, all fours clawing 
the air, as he shrieks his ecstasies of delight. It is their joy to parade 
the streets in their gayest costumes on any holiday, American, Dan- 
ish, or imaginable, that can be dragged into the calendar, dancing and 
capering with an energy which their work-a-day manner never sug- 
gests. Once a month, at full moon, the local band marches through 
the town playing " Onward, Christian Soldiers," the population trail- 
ing en masse behind it, singing, clapping hands, and swaying their 
rather slender, underfed bodies violently in cadence with the music. 
They are ardent church-goers in theory, there being six large churches 
of as many denominations in town — but it takes a rousing round of 
hymns to bring the majority to indoor services, though boatmen far 
out in the bay recognize a street meeting of the Salvation Army by the 
howling chorus of " Lord, ha' mercy on mah sou-ul," which the cliffs 
echo out to them. 

The Sunday evening band concert, on the other hand, is staid enough 
to make a Spanish-American retreta seem uproarious by comparison. 
It begins at nine, after the last church service of a Britishly dead Sun- 
day. The native band, recruited by the administrative Americans, 



308 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

jet black in features and snow-white in uniform, mounts to the roof 
of the old red fortress, while outwardly immaculate negroes, stroll 
rather funereally about little Emancipation Park and along the edge 
of the quay. The elite of the town sit in their houses, piled steeply -up 
the pyramidal hills, and let the music float up to them on the harbor 
breeze. Our new fellow-countrymen are ostentatiously patriotic in 
all that concerns mere formalities. Every morning at eight all St. 
Thomas becomes static when the marine band plays our national an- 
them. The market-women on the wharf halt as if suddenly turned to 
stone, holding whatever posture they happen to be caught in until the 
last note has died away; the very boatmen in the bay sit with their j 
poised oars motionless. Flags burst forth not merely on our own holi- ! 
days, but on Danish, on every possible fete day, public or private, even 
on the birthdays of distant relatives or mere friends. Curious super- 
stitions enliven the quaint local color. The appearance of a lizard in 
the house is sure proof to the lower classes that there is soon to be an 
addition to the family. Servant girls cannot be induced to remove 
their hats, whether cooking, making beds, or waiting on table at the 
most formal dinner, for fear of sudden death from " dew " falling 
on their heads — though it be full blazing noonday. 

The great majority of the population is undernourished. Even 
when their earnings are sufficient, most of the money is spent on 
dress. The chief diet of the rank and file is sugar. A sugar-cane 
three times a day seems to be enough to keep many of them alive. The 
morning meal for the rest consists of " tea " only, the local meaning 
of that word being a cupful of sugar dissolved in warm water. Then 
along in the middle of the afternoon they indulge in their only real 
food, and not very real at that. This is a plate of " fungee," a nau- 
seating mixture of fish and corn-meal, which to the local taste is pre- 
ferable to the most succulent beefsteak. The natural result of the con- 
stant consumption of sugar is an early scarcity of teeth. Barely three 
men in twenty could be enlisted in the native corps, chiefly because 
of their inability to cope with navy rations. 

It goes without saying that such a population does not furnish 
model workmen. From Friday night to Tuesday morning is apt 
to be treated as " the Sabbath." The man who works two days a 
week at eighty cents has enough to provide himself with sugar-cane 
and " fungee." On the whole, the women are more industrious than 
the men, perhaps because the great disparity of sexes makes the pos- 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 309 

session of a " man " something in the nature of a luxury. Time was 
when the women of St. Thomas were able to support their husbands 
in a more fitting manner than at present. In the good old days hundreds 
of ships coaled here every month; now many a day passes without 
one bringing a throng of negresses scampering for the coaling-wharf 
far out beyond " Bluebeard's Castle." In a constant stream the soot- 
draped women jog up the gang-plank, balancing the eighty-pound 
basket of coal on their heads, often without touching it, thrust out a 
begrimed hand for the three cents a trip which a local labor leader has 
won them in place of the original one, drop the coins into a dust-laden 
pocket, dump their load into the steamer's chute, and trot' down again. 
Sometimes the ship is a man-of-war that unfairly speeds up the pace 
of coalers by having its band play rousing music on the upper deck. 
Here and there a man may be made out in the endless chain of black 
humanity. At least one of them works with his wife as a "team" 
i — by carrying the empty basket back to be filled while she mounts 
with the full one. But most of the males have the point of view of the 
big " buck nigger " who was lying in the shade of the coal-pile watch- 
ing the process with an air of languid contentment. " Why de coalin' 
is done by women, sah ? " he repeated, scratching his head for a re- 
ply. " Why, dat 's woman's work." 

The population of our Virgin Islands is overwhelmingly negro. 
Even Charlotte Amalie cannot muster one white man to ten of African 
ancestry, and not a fourth of the latter show any Caucasian mixture. 
Once upon a time the Jews were numerous ; there is still a Jewish 
cemetery, but the synagogue has been abandoned for lack of congre- 
gation. Though the islands were Danish for nearly two and a half 
centuries, their language has always been English, probably because 
their business has ever been with ships and men who, though it may 
not always have been their native tongue, spoke the language of the 
sea. Some six years before we purchased the islands the Danes made 
an attempt to teach Danish in the schools. But though many little 
negroes learned to chatter more or less fluently in that tongue, to the 
detriment of more essential studies, the local environment proved too 
strong, and the very Danish officials became proficient in English in 
spite of themselves, though even the British school superintendent was 
required to write his correspondence and reports in the official tongue. 

The only element of the population that has never succumbed to 
its environment, either racially or linguistically, are the " Chachas." 



310 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

They are a community of French fishermen, who have themselves lost 
any certain notion of how they came to be stranded on rocky St. 
Thomas. Some two hundred of them live in their own village on the 
outskirts of Charlotte Amalie; others are scattered along the trail to 
a similar village called Hull, on the opposite side of the island. In- 
termarriage has given them all a striking family resemblance, and 
it is hours before the newcomer realizes that it is not the same man he 
has met over and over again, peddling his fish, his goats, or his crude 
straw hats in the streets of the town, but a score of more or less close 
relatives. They have preserved their blood pure from the slightest 
negro strain ; but their aloofness has given them a sort of sick-bed 
pallor, an anemia both of physique and manner, especially among the 
women, an almost complete loss of teeth, and little power to resist dis- 
ease. Yet the men at least have by no means lost their old " pep." 
They can still fight in a two-fisted manner that is the awe of their 
negro neighbors, and they venture fearlessly far out to sea in their 
little narrow-chested fishing boats. 

The adults speak a perfectly comprehensible French, but the 
" Creole " of the children is but little improvement on that of Haiti. 
For many years they had their own school, taught by an old French- 
man who drew the princely salary of five dollars a month. Since 
his death the children have been attending the English-speaking Catho- 
lic school, and some of them already mispronounce a certain amount 
of that tongue — and can beg as fluently as the little black urchins 
that swarm about any white stranger. But their aloofness from the 
colored population remains. The latter scorn them as only a negro 
can the white man who has fallen socially to his own level, though they 
take care not to refer to them by the popular nickname within reach 
of their hardened fists. The term is said to have had its origin in 
the word chasser with which the fishermen interlard their cries. They 
call themselves francais, and have a simplicity which suggests they 
have followed the same calling for many generations. Their houses 
are mere cabins, with shingled walls and thatched roofs, scattered 
about the sand knolls at the edge of the bay. These are always floored, 
decorated with a few chromo prints of a religious nature, and have 
a better claim to neatness than the hovels of the negroes about them. 
While the latter loaf, the " Chachas " ply their chosen calling dili- 
gently, but on Sunday afternoons they may be found in groups, play- 
ing cards in the shade of their date palms, their curious hats of sewn 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 311 

ribbons of straw tossed on the sandy soil about them. They profess 
complete indifference to their island's change of sovereignty, except to 
wonder in vague voices if it is this that has brought the appalling in- 
crease in the prices of food. 

Seen from any of its three hills, Charlotte Amalie looks more like a 
stage setting than a real town. Its sheet-iron roofs, many of them 
painted red, seem to be cut out of cardboard, and the steepness of 
the slopes on which the majority of its houses are built suggests the 
fantasy of the scene-painter rather than cold practicability. A single 
long, level street, still known, on its placards at least, as Kronprindsens 
Gade, runs the length of the town and contains nearly all its commerce. 
The rest start bravely up the steep hills, but soon tire, like the in- 
habitants, and leave their task incompleted. On the eastern side, where 
the storms come from, the houses have glass windows, almost un- 
known in the larger islands to the westward, and are fitted on all sides 
with heavy wooden hurricane-shutters. If these are closed in time, the 
roofs can withstand the frequent high winds that sweep down upon 
the island, but the local weather prophet has an unenviable task, for 
to give the signal for closing the shutters when there is no need for 
it is as reprehensible from the native point of view as to fail to fore- 
see real danger. Bulky stone or brick ovens, separate from the houses, 
are the only buildings with chimneys, and many of these were mutil- 
ated by the hurricane of four years ago. Palm-trees and great masses 
of red and purple bougainvillea add a crowning beauty to a scene that 
would be entrancing even without them. 

Of a score of solemn old buildings the most imposing is the resi- 
dence of the governor on the middle of the three hills. Higher still 
stands a grim tower known as " Blackbeard's Castle," about which 
cling many legends, but no other certainty than that it was built by a 
turbulent colonist of long ago, who was credited, justly no doubt, since 
that clan has not wholly died out in St. Thomas to this day, with being 
a pirate. But this structure is of slight interest to the average visitor 
compared to a similar one on the eastern hill, reputed far and wide 
as the original " Bluebeard's Castle." Just how it gained this reputa- 
tion is not easily apparent, for its real history is almost an open book. 
Built by the Danish government in 1700 as a fort, probably to overawe 
the slaves in the town below, it remained the property of the king 
until a century ago, when it fell into private hands. If any other 



3 i2 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

proof of its entirely unromantic character is needed, it is sufficient to 
know that it now belongs to an Episcopal clergyman living in Brook- 
lyn ! 

With stone walls five feet thick, three rooms one above the other, 
and all in all a pitiless visage, the tower easily lends itself to the 
imagination as the scene of marital treachery. The old negro care- 
taker will assure you that the dreadful crimes took place in it " jes' like 
de storybook tell." The yarn that has a wider local belief is some- 
what different. According to this an old trader married a beautiful 
girl of Charlotte Amalie and locked her up in the castle while he left 
the island on business. During his absence she discovered a mysteri- 
ous old chest in the upper story and finally yielded to the feminine im- 
pulse to open it. In it she found letters from a dozen of her hus- 
band's discarded sweethearts, all of whom still lived in the town. She 
invited them to a banquet in the castle — the significant detail of how 
she got the door open being passed over in silence — and poisoned 
them. From there on the tale forks. One ending has it that the 
husband returned, repented, and committed suicide while the beauti- 
ful wife was being tried for murder; the other, that he rushed in and 
carried her off just as she was about to be burned at the stake. 

The eyes of the modern visitor are sure to be drawn to what looks 
like an attempt to pave a large section of the steep hill behind the town. 
A great triangular patch of cement gleaming in the sun on one of the 
slopes brings to mind the island's greatest problem. St. Thomas de- 
pends entirely upon the rains for her water-supply, for the water to be 
had by boring is so brackish that it ruins even a steamer's boilers. 
When renting or buying a house the most important question is to 
know the size and condition of its cistern and what provision has been 
made for filling it. In the dry season, which is heartlessly long and 
appallingly dry, the poorer people wander from house to house beg- 
ging a " pan " of water, and the word means a receptacle of any size 
or shape that will hold the precious liquid. The town is convinced 
that its commercial decline is due to its lack of water, and that it will 
come into its own again if only Uncle Sam will cover its hillsides with 
cement or galvanized iron. If they had immense cisterns and a means 
of filling them, they say, ships would no longer go to Ponce for water, 
and perhaps pick up their coal in Porto Rico also, but would put in at 
St. Thomas for all their supplies. To make matters worse, the change 
of sovereignty has brought with it the inability to furnish other liquids 
for which sea-faring men have looked to St. Thomas for centuries. 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 313 

That seemed the last straw, but another has since been added to the al- 
ready crushing burden. St. Thomas has long been famous for its bay 
rum. As a matter of fact the bay oil comes from St. John and the rum 
came from St. Croix, until the colonial council voted the islands " dry " 
— " as if we were not dry enough already." But the mixture and sale 
thereof brought many a dollar into local pockets. Soon after the 
" dry " law went into effect, the natives, to say nothing of our thirsty 
marines, made the brilliant discovery that the addition of a bit of bay 
oil to their favorite refreshment left it none the less exhilarating. Ban- 
ished hilarity returned. The governor was shocked beyond measure, 
and the sale even of bay rum is now forbidden except on a police per- 
mit, issued only on proof that it was not to be used for beverage 
purposes. It is almost as easy to prove that the moon is made of 
green cheese. The Virgin Islanders have several grievances against 
the Americans who have adopted them, the strictness of their color- 
line, for instance; but the greatest of these is prohibition. 

The cluster of islands just east of Porto Rico was discovered by 
Columbus on his second voyage ; anything that escaped him on the 
first journey seems to enjoy at least that secondary distinction. He 
named them the Eleven Thousand Virgins; just why, not even his 
biographers seem to know. It may be that he had just been awakened 
from a bad dream, or possibly the expression was an old-fashioned 
Italian form of profanity. It would be easy to think of a more ap- 
propriate name, but they have remained the Virgin Islands to this 
day. 

The Spaniards stopped long enough to exterminate the Indians, but 
it was a long time before any one thought it worth while to settle in 
such a region. Nothing is more natural than that the name should 
finally have attracted to it u party of Frenchmen. Evidently they 
found it disappointing, for they did not increase. Then the Danish 
West India Company laid claim to St. Thomas and its adjacent 
islands, and in 1671 a governor was sent out from Denmark, who 
founded the town of Charlotte Amalie, which he named for the then 
Danish queen. Of course the British captured the place a few times, 
and it was often harassed by fires, hurricanes, and slave rebellions, 
all of which it more or less successfully survived. St. Thomas be- 
came a harbor of refuge for pirates, and it frequently became neces- 
sary for the English governor of Nevis to raid it — for the British, 
you remember, did not believe in piracy. When the gentlemen en- 



314 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

listed under the skull-and-cross-bones banner had gone the way of 
all rascals, the island soon won a place of importance as a distributing 
center for slaves. 

Meanwhile St. Croix, which is neither geographically, geologically, 
nor historically a bona fide member of the Virgin group, had been hav- 
ing a history of its own. The Knights of Malta colonized it first 
with three hundred Frenchmen, but these soon decided that Santo 
Domingo offered better real estate possibilities. Then when the Dutch 
and the British had concluded that France had a better armed right to 
it, the latter sold it to the Danish Company for 750,000 livres. Just 
how much that was in real money I am not in a position to state, be- 
yond the assertion that it .would buy far more then than it will nowa- 
days. Thenceforth St. Croix has followed the fate of the other Dan- 
ish West Indies. 

Many of the colonists were disturbers of the peace or agitators, 
the Bolshevists, in short, of those days, who found it to their ad- 
vantage to abandon the near-by French and British Leeward Islands. 
They became too much for the Company, which in 1764 sold 
the whole collection to the Danish crown. All three of the islands 
of any importance were long planted in sugar-cane. It covered even 
the tops of the hills, those of St. Thomas being cultivated by hand 
in little stone-faced terraces. To-day sugar-cane has completely dis- 
appeared from St. Thomas, almost entirely from St. John, and is 
grown only on the level southern side of St. Croix. Several slave 
uprisings had been suppressed with more or less bloodshed when Den- 
mark subscribed to the then astounding theory that slavery should 
be abolished. The agricultural importance of the islands began at 
once to decline. Free labor was cheap, but it would not labor. Then, 
too, the competition of sugar grown more economically elsewhere and 
Napoleon's establishment of a bounty for beet-sugar growers began 
to make life dreary for all West Indian planters. 

However, as their agriculture declined, the importance of the Dan- 
ish islands as a shipping and distributing center increased, though 
their days of greatest prosperity were from 1820 to 1830, when the 
two coincided. St. Thomas harbor was forested with the masts of 
sailing vessels, carrying goods to and from the four points of the 
compass. Then along came Robert Fulton with more trouble for the 
poor harassed islanders. Steam navigation made it easy for the 
West Indies and South America to import goods direct from Europe, 
and the Virgin Island merchants began to lose their rake-off. They 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 315 

picked up, however, by establishing a coaling station and making St. 
Thomas a free port and a general depot of sea-going supplies. Be- 
fore the World War scores of ships entered the harbor every week; 
now the pilot often does not drop his feet from his hammock to the 
floor for several days at a time. 

For all this, the islands were a liability rather than an asset to the 
Danes, and they had long been looking for some kind Samaritan to 
take them off their hands. Under Lincoln, Secretary Seward nego- 
tiated a treaty by which we were to have all the group except St. 
Croix for $7,500,000. A vote of the population showed them over- 
whelmingly in favor of the change ; the Danish Government was 
paternal, but it was far away and unprogressive. The treaty was 
ratified in Denmark. The king issued a manifesto telling his loyal 
subjects how sorry he was to part w T ith them, but assuring them, as 
fathers always do, that it was for their own good. He did not men- 
tion that he needed the money. Two years later he was forced to 
admit in another royal document that he was not parting with them, 
after all. Senator Sumner, chairman of our Foreign Relations Com- 
mittee, did not walk hand in hand with President Johnson. For two 
years he kept the treaty in his official pocket, and when it did at length 
reappear under Grant, it was adversely reported. 

In 1902 a better bargain was struck. A new treaty setting the price 
of the whole group at $5,000,000 was drawn up, and ratified by the 
American Senate. But this time the Danish Rigsdag turned the tables. 
Perhaps they had inside information on the future development of 
American politics. If so it proved trustworthy, for by 1916 we were 
in the hands of an administration to whom mere money was no object. 
The Danes quickly caught the idea, the people themselves voted to sell 
while the selling was good, and on the last day of March, 1917, old 
Danneborg was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes raised in its 
place. 

I have yet to find any one who knows just why we bought the Vir- 
gin Islands, still less why we paid twenty-five millions for them. As 
a navy man engaged in governing them put it, " They are. not worth 
forty cents to us, or to any one else ; though " he added, " it would have 
been worth a hundred million to keep Germany from getting them." 
If the loss of the twenty-five millions were an end of the matter, we 
might forget it; but it is costing us more than half a million a year to 
support our little black children. Furthermore, the Danes made the 



316 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

most of their ripe opportunity not only in the matter of price, but in 
an astonishing number of concessions in their favor. Evidently our 
Government said to them, " Go ahead and write a treaty, and we '11 sign 
it " ; and then in the press of saving the world for democracy we did 
not have time to glance it over before adding our signature. 

If a farmer bought a farm for, say, twenty-five hundred dollars, 
and found, when he came to take possession of it, that it would cost 
him fifty dollars a year out of his pocket to run it, that it was in- 
habited by a happy-go-lucky lot of negroes who expected him to do 
many things for them, from curing their wide-spread disease to send- 
ing them to school ; if, furthermore, he discovered that the former 
owners still held everything on the farm that was worth owning 
except the title-deed, he would probably give it away to* the first un- 
suspecting tenderfoot who happened along. Unfortunately, govern- 
ments cannot indulge in that dying-horse method of laying down their 
burdens. Even had the purchase price of almost three hundred dol- 
lars an acre included everything of monetary value on the islands, 
from the wardrobes of the inhabitants to the last peasant's hut, we 
should have made a bad bargain. But about all we got for our twenty- 
five millions is the right to fly our flag over the islands, and half a 
dozen old forts and government buildings entirely stripped of their 
furniture. The Danish Government has the reputation of being con- 
servative and economical. It surely is, in more senses than one. 
By the termis of the treaty " the movables, especially the silver plate 
and the pictures, remain the property of the Danish Government and 
shall, as soon as circumstances permit, be removed by it." By virtue 
of that clause they sold at auction every stick of furniture in the public 
buildings ; they tore the mirrors off the walls ; they removed the gilt 
moldings from them ; they tried to tear off the embossed leathery 
wall-paper, and left the rooms looking as if a party of yeggmen had 
gutted them ; they took down and carried away the rope on the govern- 
ment flagpole! Economy is a splendid trait, but they might have left 
us a chair in which to mourn the loss of our twenty-five — and more 
— millions. 

Everything worth owning in the islands is still in private, princi- 
pally Danish, hands. When we planned to erect a naval station on 
an utterly worthless stony hill on St. Thomas harbor, the owners de- 
manded twenty-five hundred dollars an acre for it. We must main- 
tain all the grants, concessions, and licenses left by the Danish Gov- 






IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 317 

ernment. " Det Vestindiske Kompagni " retains most of the harbor 
privileges ; another Danish company, of which the principal share- 
holder is Prince Axel, cousin of the king, holds the coaling rights, the 
electric lighting rights, the right to operate a dry-dock. We cannot 
even use American money in our new possessions. The Danish West 
Indian bank has the exclusive concession for issuing notes until 1934, 
paying a ten per cent, tax on profits to the Danish Government, and 
the good old greenback must be exchanged for the domestic shin- 
plasters. Naval men stationed in St. Thomas are forced to pay this 
institution as high as two per cent, discount on their U. S. government 
pay checks; the yearly budget of our new colony must be made in 
Danish francs. But though the domestic money is officially in francs 
and " bits," the people talk in dollars and cents as universally as they 
speak English instead of Danish. It is difficult to find anything left 
by the old regime that is not protected by that curiously one- 
sided treaty. An American remarked casually to an old Danish 
resident one evening as they were strolling through Emancipation 
Park : 

" I think we '11 tear down that old bust of King Christian IX and 
put one of Lincoln in its place." 

"Vat?" shrieked the Dane. "You can't do that. Eet ees in de 
treaty." 

By some oversight the Danes failed to provide for a few of the 
minor concessions. There were the apothecaries, for instance. Un- 
der Danish rule one was given exclusive rights in each of the three 
towns and its contiguous territory. They were inspected often, old 
drugs being thrown out ; and they were not allowed to sell patent medi- 
cines. Their prices are reasonable as monopolies go, their stores well 
kept, and their stock ample, within Danish limits. When the islands 
were sold, the apothecaries complained to the king that they were in 
danger of being ruined by American competition ; whereupon the king, 
out of the goodness of his heart — and the fullness of the twenty-five 
million - — gave them $30,000 each. Four years have passed since the 
druggists pocketed this salve to their injured profits, and they are 
still doing business at the old stands without a rival in sight. 

Indeed, there is little evidence of that influx of American business 
men which was predicted as sure to follow the flag. So far the only 
one is a young ex-marine who is breaking into the restaurant and 
soda-fountain business. He has been fought at every step by the 



318 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

local merchants. Living exclusively on trade, with hundred per cent, 
profits customary from time immemorial, the wealthier class of the 
islanders have the cuteness of the shopkeeper developed to the nth 
degree, and they will not readily consent to competition by rank out-) 
siders from the United States. 

Among the things which the Danes left behind were their laws, and 
their own judge to administer them. True, Judge Thiele has become 
an American citizen, but it is a curious sight to see Americans-born 
brought into court by negro policemen, to be tried by a man who is 
still a foreigner in point of view and thinking processes in spite of 
being no longer officially a subject of the King of Denmark. There 
are those who claim he sides with the favorites of the old Government 
to the decided disadvantage of Americans, though there are more 
who speak well of him. It is enough to know that Americans are be- 
ing tried in American territory under the Napoleonic code, in that 
laborious old-fashioned style by which the judge questions the wit- 
nesses, dictates their answers in his own more cultured words to a 
clerk, who writes them all down in laborious longhand in a great 
ledger, to be sure that a change should be made in the judiciary system 
of our Virgin Islands. 

Having bought them, and being forced to support them for the rest 
of our natural existence, it might be of interest to make a brief in- 
ventory of our new possessions. The total area of the three islands, 
with their seventeen keys, only three or four of which are inhabited, 
is about 140 square miles. The census taken soon after the raising 
. of the Stars and Stripes showed something over twenty-six thousand 
inhabitants, but several signs indicate that these are decreasing. The 
only real value of the Virgin group proper is the splendid harbor of 
St. Thomas. St. Croix, forty miles distant from it is considerably 
larger than all the rest of this group put together, more populous, 
\ more fertile, and could easily be made self-supporting governmentally, 
I as it always has been privately, particularly with the introduction of 
* an extensive system of irrigation. 

A couple of trails zigzag up the reddish, dry hillside behind Char- 
lotte Amalie, scattering along the way a few hovels. They really lead 
nowhere, however, for there is no other town than the capital on the 
island. The hurricane of 191 6 blew down most of the farm-houses 
and many of the trees, and they were never rebuilt or replanted. 
Once heavily forested, later Nile-green with sugar-cane, St. Thomas 



\ 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 319 

is now brown, arid, and dreary, with scarcely a tenth of its acreage 
under even half-hearted cultivation. Being all " mountain," fifteen 
hundred feet high in one spot, with buttresses running down to the 
sea in every direction, it can hardly be expected to compete with modern 
agricultural methods. Moreover, eight of its ten thousand inhabitants 
have been drawn into town by the higher wages of harbor work, and 
though there is now a scarcity of that, they still remain, to the detri- 
ment of what might be moderately productive plantations, forcing the 
island to draw its food from St. John, the British Virgins, or Porto 
Rico. A journey over the " mountain " brings little reward except 
some marvelous views and yet another proof of how primitive the hu- 
man family may become. 

A so-called road traverses the island from east to west. In com- 
pany with a navy doctor I bumped by Ford along the eastern half of 
this to Water Bay. A cattle-raising estate called " Tatu," with a 
three-story, red-roofed dwelling, was the only sign of industry along 
the route. Near the bay we overtook a man on his way — at nine 
o'clock in the morning — to dig a well for the estate owner, and soon 
talked him into rowing us across to St. John instead. For the wind 
was dead ahead, and the old ,sail in the bottom of his patched and 
weather-warped dory would have been far more hindrance than help 
in negotiating the stormy three-mile passage between the islands. Once 
landed, in Cruz Bay, we rented St. John's only public means of con- 
veyance, — two hard-gaited horses named " Bess " and " Candy Kid " 
— and rode out into the wilderness. 

St. John is little more than that. Its twenty square miles have al- 
most entirely gone back to forest, through which a few trails meander 
amid a silence as unbroken as that of Robinson Crusoe's place of ex- 
ile. There is not a wheeled vehicle on the island; one may ride for 
miles without meeting an inhabitant, and the very birds seem to have 
abandoned it for more progressive climes. Yet rusted iron kettles and 
the ruins of stone sugar-mills, scattered here and there in forest 
and scrub, show that the island was once a place of industry. Sugar 
and cotton plantations almost completely covered it when, in 1733, a 
slave rebellion started it on a decline that has never since ceased. The 
whites quelled the uprising, after a half hundred of them and four 
times as many blacks had lost their lives, but the negroes won in the 
end, for the last census showed but four white men on the island. 
To-day it has barely eight hundred inhabitants, of whom, unlike the 
other islands, the majority are men. A few mangoes and bananas, 



320 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

yams, okre, and a kind of tropical pumpkin keep its hut-dwellers alive. 
Here and there is a little patch of cane, from which rum was made 
before the Americans came to interfere with that ; limes are cultivated 
rather languidly in a few hillside orchards, and the high ridge between 
Hope and Bordeaux is covered with bay-trees. 

These vary in size from mere saplings to trees twenty feet in height. 
The picking is best done in June, when men and boys break off the 
smaller branches and carry them to the distilleries. Here the leaves 
are cooked in sea water in immense brass decanters, from which the 
bay oil is drawn off, and the leaves tossed out, apparently unchanged 
except from green to a coppery brown. One hundred and thirty 
pounds of leaves are required to produce a quart of oil, which sells 
at present for six dollars, and has long had the reputation of being the 
best on the market. The bay-tree estates give occasional labor to the 
inhabitants, but their livelihood depends chiefly on their own little 
patches of tropical vegetables, their cattle, and their fishing. From 
the high points of the island one has an embracing view of the British 
Virgin Islands, separated from our own by only a few miles, and 
framed in the Caribbean like emeralds of fantastic shape in a setting of 
translucent blue. 

There are no towns on St. John. The nearest semblance to them 
are a few scattered clusters of huts around the shores, where customs 
are as backward as those of Africa, or Haiti. A handful of these 
simple dwellings are rather picturesquely strewn up the steep fish- 
hook-shaped peninsula that forms the eastern end of the island, con- 
nected to the rest by a narrow neck of land. Between this and what 
might be called the mainland is Coral Bay, a harbor of far greater 
depth than that of St. Thomas, and so much larger that, experts tell 
us, the construction of two break-waters would make it a safe an- 
chorage for the largest navy in the world. But what, in the name of 
Neptune, would the world's largest navy find to do there? 

We met all the elite of St. John at the Moravian mission of Emmaus 
at the head of Coral Bay. The census showed the island inhabited 
by one Catholic, forty Lutherans, and the rest Moravians, hence there 
were few local celebrities missing at the annual " show " which hap- 
pened to coincide with our visit. Negroes dressed in their most solemn 
garments, the men in staid black, the women in starched white, poured 
in on horseback and afoot from moonrise until the first of the dole- 
ful religious songs and the amusingly stupid dialogues began in the 
school chapel. There was the black government doctor, the negro 




rf "J 



s-S 



G i- 





A familiar sight in St. Croix, the ruins of an old sugar mill and the stone tower of its cane 

grinding windmill 




A cistern in which rain water is stored for drinking purposes 






IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 321 

owners of the two or three farms so large as to be locally known as 
" estates," the island's few school teachers — its policeman himself 
might have been there had I not deprived him of the use of his 
" Candy Kid." To tell the truth they gave a rather good impression, 
decidedly a better one than the traveler-baiters of St. Thomas. They 
were almost English in their cold leisurely deportment, yet more volubly 
courteous, and with few exceptions they frankly looked down upon 
white men. Many of them had the outward indices of education, 
speaking with a chosen-worded formality that suggested a national 
convention of pedagogues ; not a hint of hilarity enlivened their inter- 
course. Perhaps the most amusing part of all was the overdone com- 
pany-manner in which they treated their wives, those same wives who 
no doubt would take up the chief family burdens again, once the night 
had separated the gathering into its natural component parts. 

We found Carl Francis more nearly what it is to be hoped our new 
wards can all gradually be brought to resemble. A member of the 
Colonial Council, notorious throughout the colony as the man who 
dared tell the congressional committee in public session that the chief 
trouble with the Virgin Islands is the laziness of their inhabitants, 
he would outrank many a politician of our own land in public spirit, 
for all his ebony skin. He confirmed the famous statement above 
mentioned, but added that there were other things which St. John 
needed for its advancement. It needs a mail service, for instance, such 
as it had under the Danes, instead of being obliged to go to Charlotte 
Amalie to post or receive its letters. It needs more schools, so that its 
children shall not have to walk mile's over the mountains morning and 
evening. It must have something in the nature of an agricultural 
bank to lend the inhabitants wherewithal to replant the old estates, 
if St. John is to regain under the American flag something of its 
eighteenth century prosperity. 

If the Virginia was unworthy of her calling, what shall I say of the 
Creole, which carried me from St. Thomas to St. Croix? A battered 
old sloop of a type so ancient that her massive wooden rail resembled 
that of a colonial veranda, barely fifty feet long, and nearly as wide, 
her bottom so covered with barnacles that she did little more than 
creep in the strongest breeze, she represented the last stage in ocean- 
going traffic. Not only were there no other whites on board, but not 
even a mulatto. The passenger-list was made up chiefly of a batch 
of criminals and insane who were being sent to their respective insti- 



322 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tutions in St. Croix. Most of them wore handcuffs and leg-irons, 
and the rattle of chains and the shrieks of their wearers suggested 
the slave-ships of olden days. One of the mad women screamed for 
unbroken hours in the lingo of the Dutch West Indies ; another con- 
ducted single-handed an entire church service, hymns, sermon, pray- 
ers, and all. 

Yet the crew were at least grown men, and if they were monkey- 
like in their playful moods, they had real discipline and a sense of re- 
sponsibility when the time came for it that was a welcome contrast 
to the surly indifference with which the boys on the Virginia carried 
out their orders. The captain was a black man of the coast fisherman 
type, but the most entertaining part of the voyage was the unfailing 
" sir " with which the mate, a cadaverous old negro who wore a heavy 
wool skating-cap and a sort of trench-coat fit for the Arctic even at 
high noon, ended his careful repetition of the skipper's every command. 
Moreover, — for we are all apt to judge things from our own petty 
personal-comfort angle — the captain and most of his men treated a 
white man as if he were of royal blood. Not only did he find me a 
canvas steamer-chair, but he refused any of the other passengers ad- 
mittance to the three-berth cabin, lest they should " disturb de gen'le- 
man." If only he had been able to adjourn the church service and 
the other uproar beyond the bulkhead, I might have had a real night's 
sleep. 

We left at five in the evening, and by sunrise had covered the forty 
miles, — though not, unfortunately, in the right direction. Had our 
destination been Fredriksted at the west end of the island, we should 
have landed early. But the Creole's contract calls for a service be- 
tween St. Thomas and Christiansted, the two capitals of our Virgin 
group, and all day long we wallowed eastward under the lee of St. 
Croix's mountainous northern coast, while " de lepards," as the sane 
passengers called their unsound sisters below, shrieked their maudlin 
complaints and the church service began over and over again with a 
" Brethren, let us pray for her." 

Christiansted is prettily situated amid cocoanut-palms and sloping 
cane-fields at the back of a wide bay, but a long reef with an exceed- 
ingly narrow entrance gives it a poor harbor. Its white or cream- 
colored houses, with here and there a red roof, lend it a touch that is 
lacking in the half-dozen rather grim-faced villages and estates that 
may be seen scattered to right and left along the rugged coast. The 
town has wide, rather well-kept streets, many stone houses, an impos- 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 323 

ing government building, and climbs away up the stony slope behind 
as if it had once planned to grow, but had changed its mind. Old- 
fashioned chain pumps supply it with water, from wells rather than 
from cisterns ; a big Catholic church is barely outrivaled in size by 
the Anglican; on the whole, it seems better swept than more populous 
Charlotte Amalie. Its people are simple-mannered, rather " gawky," 
in fact, with a tendency to stare strangers out of countenance, and have 
a leisureliness that shows even in the long-drawn " Good ahftehnoon, 
sar," with which they greet passers-by. 

Christiansted, and all St. Croix, has a special grievance against the 
Americans. Under the Danes the governor spent half the year in 
this second capital. Now the ruler of the islands only occasionally runs 
over from St. Thomas in his private yacht, often returning the same 
day, and the Croixians feel slighted. When the admiral and his aides 
land, it is mildly like the arrival of royalty. A band or two and most 
of the population are drawn up in the sanded space facing the wharf, 
whence all proceed to a meeting of the Colonial Council in the old 
government building. 

Across the street from this is a shop in which Alexander Hamilton 
once clerked. His mother, born in St. Croix, married a man named 
Levine, who abused her, whereupon she went to live with a Scotchman 
named Hamilton in the neighboring British island of Nevis. There 
Alexander was born, but when his father went to seek his fortune else- 
where, the mother returned to her native island. While clerking in 
the Christiansted shop, the son wrote his father a letter describing a 
hurricane that had swept St. Croix, the father showed it to influential 
friends, with the result that Alexander was sent to King's College 
(now Columbia University), and, thanks partly to Aaron Burr, never 
returned to the West Indies. Meanwhile his mother remained in St. 
Croix until her death, and was buried on a knoll a few miles west of 
Christiansted. It is a pleasant burial place, with constant shade and 
a never-failing trade wind fanning the flowers above it, a quaint old 
homestead behind it, and a modern monument erected by an American 
woman, inscribed: 

Rachael Fawcett Levine 

1736-1768 

She was the Mother of Alexander Hamilton 

St. Croix is far more of a real country than all the other islands 
of the group put together. Not only is it much larger, being twenty 



324 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

miles long and five wide, but is much more extensively cultivated. 
Three splendid roads run nearly the length of the island, with numer- 
ous cross roads in good condition. Only the rocky eastern end is a 
wilderness to which deer, brought into St. Croix by the British when 
they controlled it during the Napoleonic wars, go to hide after the 
cane-fields are cut, such a wilderness that hunters rarely succeed in 
stalking the wary animals in the dense undergrowth. There are far 
more signs of industry in St. Croix than in St. Thomas ; its estate- 
owners are on the whole an intelligent, progressive class, with a social 
life quite different from that on the more primitive islands. When 
one has seen St. Croix, the twenty-five million does not seem quite so 
complete and irreparable a loss. 

I took the " King's Road " through the middle of the island. It 
runs for fourteen miles, from Christiansted, the capital, to Frederik- 
sted, its rival. These names being too much effort for the negro 
tongue, the towns are known locally as " Boss End " (either a cor- 
ruption of the French Bassin or an acknowledgement that the " bosses " 
of the island always lived in the capital) and "West End." The 
northern side is abrupt, with deep water close to the shore, its high- 
est peak, Mount Eagle, rising 1180 feet. South of this range are 
undulating, fertile valleys and broad, rolling plains not even suggested 
along the northern coast, and the land slopes away in shoals and coral 
ledges for several miles from the beach. The highways are main- 
tained by the owners of the estates through which they run ; there- 
fore they follow a somewhat roundabout course through the cane- 
fields, that the expense of maintenance may be more evenly divided. 
They are busy roads, dotted with automobiles, of which there are 
more than one hundred on the island, many donkeys, heavy two- 
wheeled carts hauled by neck-yoked oxen, a kind of jaunting car of 
the conservative gentry, and inumerable black pedestrians. The is- 
land is everywhere punctuated with picturesque old stone windmill 
towers that once ground cane, their flailing arms long since departed, 
and gray old chimneys of abandoned sugar-mills break the sky-line on 
every hand. Some of these dull-white heaps of buildings on their hill- 
tops look like aged Norman castles ; there is something grim and north- 
ern about them that does not fit at all with the tropics. They suggest 
instead the diligence and foresightedness of the temperate zone. Old 
human tread-mills may still be found among them, and slave-house vil- 
lages that in some cases are inhabited by the laborers of to-day. Rusted 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 325 

sugar-kettles, such as are strewn through the West Indies from eastern 
Haiti to southern Trinidad, lie abandoned here and there throughout 
the island. 

Sugar-cane once covered even the tops of the hills, but to-day only 
the flatter lands are planted, though there are splendid stretches of 
cane-green valleys. The names of estates are amusing, and range 
all the way from cynicism to youthful hopefulness, — " Golden Grove," 
"Work and Rest," "Hope and Blessing," "Whim," "Slob," "Ju- 
dith's Fancy," " Barren Spot," " Adventure." The ceiba, or " silk- 
cotton tree," beautiful specimens of the royal palm, the tibet-tree, full 
of rustling pods that give it the name of " women's-tongues " in all 
the English-speaking West Indies, everywhere beautify the landscape. 
Ruins of the slave rebellion, of the earthquake of 1848, of the dis- 
astrous hurricane of 1916, are still to be found here and there. There 
is a marvelous view from King's Hill, with its old Danish gendarmerie, 
now a police station, from which the central highway, lined by palms 
and undulating through great valleys of cane, may be seen to where it 
descends to " West End " and the Caribbean. In the center of the 
picture sits Bethlehem, the largest sugar-mill on the island, with its 
cane railway and up-to-date methods. For the modern process of 
centralization is already spreading in St. Croix ; the small independent 
mills are disappearing, and with them much of the picturesquesness of 
the island. These big mills, as well as most of the small, are owned 
by Danes, half the stock of the largest being held by the Danish gov- 
ernment. Unfortunately St. Croix has put all its eggs in one basket, 
or at most, two, sugar and sea-island cotton. 

There is not a thatched roof on the island. The people live in 
moderate comfort, as comfort goes in the West Indies. Toward sun- 
set the roads are lined with women cane-cutters in knee-length skirts, 
with footless woolen stockings that suggest the tights of ballet-dancers, 
to protect their legs in the fields, pattering homeward, with their big 
cane-knives lying flat on the tops of their heads. Bits of colored rags 
sewed on the hatbands of the men indicate that they are members of 
the newly organized labor-union. They still bow and raise their hats 
to passing white men, yet one feels something of that bolshevistic at- 
mosphere which their black leaders are fostering among them. The 
King's Road passes a large distillery, which prohibition has closed. 
Formerly St. Croix made much rum ; now it is giving its attention 
rather to syrup than to sugar, as there is more money in the former; 
but estate-owners are threatening to give up cane-growing and turn 



326 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

their fields into cattle pastures, so greatly have the wages of field la- 
borers increased in the last two years — from twenty-five cents to a 
dollar a day. For St. Croix is one of the few islands in the West 
Indies where '* task work " has never taken the place of a fixed daily 
wage. Cattle are plentiful on the island, from which they are sent to 
Porto Rico in tug-towed open barges. Some of them are so wild that 
they are brought down to the coast in cages on wheels, and all of them 
are roped and swung on board with little regard to their bodily com- 
fort. 

Fredriksted, the third and last town of our Virgin Islands, is a 
quaint, " Dutchy " place some five blocks wide and seven long, with 
wide sanded streets, two-storied for the most part and boasting no real 
public sidewalks ; for though what look like them run beneath the 
arcades that uphold the upper-story verandas, they are rather family 
porches, shut off by stairways or barricades, which force the pedestrian 
to take constantly to the sun-scorched streets. The town has only an 
open roadstead ; indeed, there is not a good harbor in the island. A 
native band recruited by the American navy breaks the monotony of 
life by playing here once a week, as it does daily in Christiansted. 
The cable company is required by law to furnish the world's news to 
the press, but as the pathetic little newspapers are so small that they 
can publish only a few items at a time, the despatches are habitually 
some two weeks old, each taking its chronological turn irrespective of 
importance. 

I visited several schools in the Virgin Islands. When an American 
school director arrived early in 1918 he found no records either of 
schools, pupils, or parents. By dint of going out and hunting them up, 
he discovered nineteen educational buildings on the three islands. 
Ninety per cent, of the population can read and write after a fashion, 
but the majority usually have their letters written by the public scribe, 
of whom there is one in each of the three towns, in a set form that 
gives all epistles a strong family resemblance. The school system 
was honeycombed with all sorts of petty graft. A man who received 
three dollars a month for keeping a certain school clean had not seen 
the building in years. The town clock of Christiansted has not run for 
five years, yet another favored person received a monthly stipend 
for keeping it in order. The new director and his two American 
assistants have still to contend with many difficulties. There are 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 327 

no white teachers ; those now employed were trained either in Den- 
mark or in the Moravian schools, and the " English " of most of 
them almost deserves to be ranked as an independent dialect. The 
highest teacher's salary is seventy-five, the average twenty-four dol- 
lars a month. Boys of sixteen, drawing the regal income of ten dol- 
lars monthly, conduct many of the classes. Those who served a cer- 
tain number of years under the Danes receive a pension from the 
famous twenty-five millions. They are small pensions, like those that 
went to all the small government employees whom the Danes left 
behind, and those who still hold their places protest against telling 
their new employer how much they draw from Copenhagen, fancying 
it may result in a corresponding loss in the increase they fondly hope 
for under American rule. Lack of funds has forced the director to 
maintain many of the incompetents in office. One rural school we 
visited is still taught by the local butcher, whose inefficiency is on a 
par with his custom of neglecting his educational duties for his more 
natural calling. But as the island budget does not permit an increase 
of his monthly thirty-five dollars, — and in every case it is merely 
Danish, not American, dollars, — no more competent substitute has yet 
appeared to claim the butcher's ferule. 

The country schools have few desks ; the children sit on backless 
benches, their feet usually high off the floor. The tops of the desks 
are in many cases painted black and used as blackboards. A rusty tin 
cup was found doing service for all the thirsty ; when the Americans 
attempted to improve this condition by introducing a long-handled 
dipper with an edge cut in repeated V shape, the teachers bent the 
sharp points back and returned to the old dip-your-hand-in method. 
Lessons are often done on slates or pieces of slate, which the,- teacher 
periodically sprinkles with w T ater from a bay-rum bottle, then requires 
the sums to be erased in rhythmical unison. Formerly the teachers sat 
in the middle of one large room, surrounded by eight different grades, 
and the resultant hubbub may be imagined. The Americans put in 
partitions, and the uproar is now somewhat less incoherent. In some 
of the larger schools there were half-height partitions, with little 
sliding-doors, through which the principal could peer without leaving 
his central " office." Loud protests have been heard because the 
Americans nailed these up, forcing upon the sedentary gentlemen in 
charge the exertion of walking around to the several doors. The 
teaching methods were, and in many cases still are, of that tropically 



328 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

medieval type in which the instructor asks long questions that require 
a single-word answer, even that being chiefly suggested by the ques- 
tioner. 

" What is the longest river in America ? Now, then, Miss-Mis- 
sissi — " 

The answer " pi ! " by some unusually bright pupil, is followed by 
exclamations of praise from the teacher. Like most negroes, the 
Virgin Islanders have tolerable memories, but little ability to apply 
what they learn. Not the least of the difficulties confronting the new 
director was the refopm of the Catholic schools, which had long put 
great emphasis on matters of religion and treated other subjects with 
scant attention. The attempt to better matters sent shrieks of protest 
to Washington, whence the director's hands were more or less tied by 
misinformed coreligionists. Bit by bit the Virgin Island schools are 
being improved, however, a decree permitting superintendents to fine 
the parents of pupils absent without due cause, simply by sending a 
policeman to collect the sum assessed, without any troublesome process 
of law, having given a badly needed weapon against the once wide- 
spread inattendance. Parents who decline, or are unable to pay the 
fines, are required to work one day on the roads for every dollar un- 
paid. 

There is no agriculture worth mentioning in St. Thomas and no 
employing class in St. John, hence labor troubles have been chiefly 
confined to St. Croix. The present leaders of the movement in the 
larger island are three negroes, all of them agitators of the more or 
less violent type, differing only in degree, and all more or less con- 
sciously doing their best to stir up those of their own color. The 
one considered the most radical is the least troublesome, as he can 
readily be bought off. Another, a man of some education, runs a 
newspaper advocating civil government, — that is, negro government, 
— preaching that the white man is the enemy of the black, that St. 
Croix belongs by right to the latter, and openly accusing the white 
officials of incompetency and dishonesty. In addition to this, he pub- 
lishes secretly a scurrilous sheet that is doing much to inflame the primi- 
tive minds of the masses. The third announced in a public meeting 
that " if the governor don't do what we want, we '11 take him out in 
the bay and send him back where he come from." 

" Since the Americans came, it is all for the niggers," said an old 
English estate-owner. " The niggers even steal our fruit and vege- 
tables, carrying them to town a bit at a time in their clothes, for the 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 329 

policemen are all friendly or related to them. Let those black agitators 
go on a bit longer, and we whites will have to leave the island." 

There are signs that the whites are in peril of losing the upper hand 
in the island, particularly with the methods of the present governor, 
who caters to the negroes with un-American eagerness. As an ex- 
ample, though his private yacht may be on the point of steaming from 
St. Thomas to St. Croix or vice versa, even American white women 
are left to the mercies of the filthy Creole, lest the local merchants com- 
plain that trade is being taken away from them. Yet native negro 
girls are readily carried back and forth, because they happen to be 
the daughters, relatives, or dependents of members of the colonial 
council, or of some other local officials of the islands we are paying 
taxes to support. 

The negro newspaper man sees much " social injustice " in St. Croix, 
of which certainly a customary amount exists ; but he seems incapable 
of noting the great disinclination to work and the fact that the " paltry 
dollar a day " buys scarcely one tenth the amount of labor which con- 
stitutes a day's work in the white man's countries with which he strives 
to compare his own. In 1916 he went to Denmark and raised funds 
to establish several labor-union estates on the island, where the negroes 
might raise cattle, cane, and the like, each to get permanent possession 
of the piece of land on which he was working as soon as he had paid 
off the mortgage. But the farms are already, after a bare two years 
in the hands of the union, largely over-grown with weeds, bush, and 
miserable shacks, and about the only result of the move has been 
the loss of more land to world production, and the infliction of the 
sponsor with an exaggerated self-importance that has made him lose 
the one virtue of the Virgin-Islander — his courtesy. 

On the other hand, the employing class is by no means immune to 
criticism. The larger sugar companies were paying cane-growers from 
six to seven cents Danish for sugar at the same time that they were 
selling it for from twelve to fourteen cents in American money. The 
diligent Yankee who controls the lighterage, wharfage, and many other 
monopolies at " West End," as well as sharing with the newspaper 
man the political control of the island, cannot be acquitted of the native 
charge of exorbitance. A Danish company whose profits in 1919 were 
more than a million sent all its gains to Copenhagen, instead of helping 
to stabilize the exchange by depositing them in New York. 

Among the troubles of St. Croix is the problem of what to do with 
; the " immigration fund," Sugar production requires much labor ; ever 



330 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

since slavery was abolished St. Croix has been constantly faced with the 
difficulty of getting enough of it. A large percentage of the negroes 
would rather become public charges than work more than a few days 
a week. In 1854 the planters voluntarily assessed themselves ten cents 
an acre to establish an immigration fund, the Government making up 
the deficit. Laborers were brought from the other West Indian islands, 
particularly from Barbados. Therein lies another grievance of the 
planters, who assert that though Barbados implored the Government of 
St. Croix to relieve the former island of some of its over-population, 
when the request was granted, the Barbadian authorities emptied the 
jails and sent out all their riff-raff. With the establishment of Ameri- 
can rule, it became illegal to bring in contract labor, and though the 
immigration fund now consists of more than seventy thousand dollars, 
it is impossible to use it as originally intended. Does the money belong 
to the planters, to the United States, or to the Danish Government? 
The Croixians are still heatedly debating the question, and at the same 
time are complaining of the scarcity and high price of willing labor. 

Politically, St. Thomas and St. John, with their numerous neighbor- 
ing keys and islets, constitute one municipality, and St. Croix another. 
Under the Danes the executive power was vested in a colonial governor 
appointed by the crown ; the legislative authority being held by a 
colonial council in each municipality, some of the members likewise 
crown appointments, some elected. With an American admiral as 
governor, and naval officers as secretaries and heads of departments, 
this system has continued, and will continue until our busy Congress 
finds time to establish another form of government. Though the navy 
men explain to them that they are virtually under a civil government 
without the necessity of supporting it themselves, the natives are not 
satisfied. Among other things the labor leader elected to the colonial 
council of St. Croix demands the jury trial and " suffrage based on 
manhood." The vote is at present extended to males over twenty-five 
having a personal income of three hundred dollars a year or owning 
property yielding five dollars a month. Moreover — and this, I be- 
lieve, is more than we demand even in the United States — the voters 
must be of " unblemished character." Thus the Danes sought to insure 
the ballot only to men of responsibility and there was good reason for 
the limitation. To the casual observer it seems that the growing 
tendency to give the natives the universal franchise should be combated, 
unless the islands are to become Haitian. 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 331 

Last year one of the agitators went to the United States on the hope- 
ful mission of getting all the offices filled by natives — that is, negroes. 
Luckily, his demands were not granted. Civil service already applies ; 
there is nothing to prevent a native from holding any but the higher 
offices if he is fatted for the task; but native ability is not yet high 
enough, nor insular morals stanch enough, to give any hope that a native 
government would work efficiently without white supervision. 

There is more justice in the plea for a homestead act that will turn 
the uncultivated land over to the people, though even that should 
be framed with care. One of the chief troubles with nearly all the 
West Indies is the ease with which lazy negroes may squat on public 
land. The islanders have one real kick, however, on the state of their 
postal service. Under the Danes there were mail-carriers in the towns, 
there were country post-offices, and a certain amount of rural delivery ; 
all school-teachers sold stamps, and mail was sent by any safe convey- 
ance that appeared. To-day there are only three post-offices and no 
mail delivery, the country people must carry their own letters to and 
from one of the three towns, those living on St. John being obliged to 
bring and fetch theirs from Charlotte Amalie, and though a dozen 
steamers may make the crossing during the week, the mails must wait 
for the languid and uncertain Virginia or Creole. There are only four 
postal employees in St. Thomas, in addition to the postmaster, a de- 
serving Democrat from Virginia who, in the local parlance, " does noth- 
ing but play tennis and crank a motor-boat." When one of the mail- 
schooners comes in, the population crowds into the post-office in quest 
of its mail, disrupting the service, each hopeful citizen coming back 
again every half-hour or so until he finds that the expected letter has 
not come. Yet carriers were paid only thirty-five dollars Danish under 
the Danes, and three or four of them obviated all this chaotic confusion. 

Roughly speaking, the St. Thomas division does not want civil gov- 
ernment, feeling it cannot pay for it, and St. Croix does, though her 
colonial council has asked that no change be made for the present and 
has implied that it expects the expense of government to be chiefly 
maintained by congressional appropriation even after the change is 
made. But this same body demands full jurisdiction over all taxation, 
the one thing it is least competent to handle properly, for it would 
result in the powerful and influential and their friends escaping their 
just share of the burden. There are queer quirks in the taxation system 
left by the Danes. Buildings, for instance, are taxed by the ell, or two 
square feet, with the result that old tumble-downs often pay more than 



332 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

smaller modern and useful structures. There is a tax on wheels, so 
that the largest automobile pays five dollars a year, as does the poor 
man's donkey-cart. Moreover, this money does not go to the main- 
tenance of roads, but into the colonial treasury, as does every other 
cent of revenue. Under the Danes, even with lottery taxes yielding a 
hundred thousand dollars a year, and a large income from liquor taxes, 
the islands were never self-supporting. Our income tax in place of 
these amounts to little, especially as many find ways to get out of paying 
it. The public revenues of the islands are barely a quarter million a 
year. We contribute an equal amount directly, and three hundred 
thousand dollars a year in navy salaries besides, for the governor and 
his assistants get no other recompense than their regular pay as naval 
officers. There are a few persons, not Virgin-Islanders of course, 
who advocate annexing the group to Porto Rico. Theoretically, this 
plan would greatly simplify matters ; in practice there would be certain 
decided objections to it, though the scheme might be feasible if worked 
out with care. Two things are indispensable, however, that during 
the life of the present generation the islands be given no more autonomy 
than they have at present, and above all that they be taxed by dis- 
interested outsiders. 

A new code of laws, based on th6se of Alaska and reputed to con- 
tain all the latest improvements in government, has recently been drawn 
up for the Virgin Islands. Unfortunately, the colonial council can 
reject that code if they see fit; that is another weakness in the treaty. 
Already they have marked for the pruning-knife every clause designed 
to improve the insular morals. The marriage ceremony, for instance, 
has never been taken very seriously by the natives. Unions by mutual 
consent are so numerous that our census-takers were forced to include 
a fifth class in their returns — the " consentually married." Illegiti- 
macy runs close to eighty per cent., far out-distancing even Porto Rico. 
In fact, the mass of the islanders have no morality whatever in that 
particular matter. Girls of fourteen not only have children, but boast 
of it. The Danes are largely to blame for this state of affairs, for 
there were few of them who did not leave " gutter children " behind, 
though it must be admitted that our own marines and sailors are not 
setting a much better example. The negro, being imitative, is particu- 
larly quick to copy any easy-going ways of his superiors ; hence there 
is almost a complete absence of public sentiment against such unions 
among the blacks. Formerly a special excuse was found in the high 
cost of legal and church marriages, the fees for which were virtually 






IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 333 

prohibitive to the poorer classes. To-day they are only nominal, and 
many an old couple has been married in the presence of their grand- 
children. The Danish laws compel the father to contribute two dollars 
a month to the support of his illegal children, but though the man 
seldom denies his possible parentage, the woman has frequently no 
unquestionable proof of it. The new code would force men to marry 
the mothers of their children. 

" But how can we do that ? " cried a member of the colonial council, 
often referred to as " the best native on the island," yet who makes no 
secret of having his progeny scattered far and wide. " Most of us are 
married already ; besides, we would have to legalize polygamy to carry 
out this proposed law. We are quite willing to continue the two dollars 
a month to our outside children, but how can we marry their mothers? 
They are not even of our own class ! " 

Illegitimacy gives rise to another problem. By the Danish laws 
still in force every minor must have a guardian, and that guardian can- 
not be a woman, even though she be the mother. Her older brother, 
her father, or some more distant relative, slightly interested in his 
. task, commonly becomes the legal sponsor for her fatherless offspring. 
The duties of a guardian are, succintly, to " take charge of the minor's 
property," with the resultant abuse to be expected. Policemen are 
now and then appointed the legal guardians of a dozen or more young 
rascals, and it goes without saying that they do not lie awake nights 
worrying about the moral and material advancement of their wards. 

Another clause that is not likely to escape the blue pencil of the 
councils is that giving the authorities the right to search the persons 
and carts of those carrying produce and to demand proof of its legal 
possession. Yet without some such law there is slight hope of stamp- 
ing out the wide-spread larceny of growing crops. 

One of our most serious problems in the Virgin Islands is to combat 
disease. The Danes had only three doctors on the islands ; now sixteen 
navy physicians are busy all the time. Their fees are turned into the 
colonial treasury, an arrangement nowhere else in force in American 
territory. Half the children die as a natural course, though the islands 
are really very healthful, and no white child born under proper condi- 
tions has died since American occupation. There is no hookworm and 
little malaria ; but much pellagra and " big leg," or elephantiasis. Tu- 
berculosis is common, and tests indicate that eighty per cent, of the 
population is infected with a hereditary blood disease. There is a leper 
colony in St. Croix. The present generation, in the opinion of the navy 



334 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

men, is hopeless. In the improvement of the next they are hampered 
by the ignorance, indifference, and superstition of the parents. The 
doctors of " West End " found nothing unusual in the case of a baby 
that was brought to the hospital already dead because the father had 
taken it first to a native healer, who put " chibble " (pot herbs) under 
its nose to cure it of acute indigestion. 

But there is a worse problem than that facing us in the Virgin 
Islands — the elimination of the habit of trying to live off the exertions 
of others. Thanks to their race, history, and situation, the islanders 
are inveterate, almost unconscious, beggars. Young or old, black or 
white — for environment has given even those of Caucasian ancestry 
almost the same habits and " ideals " as the negro — they are all gifted 
with the extended palm. If they do not all beg individually, they do so 
collectively, in a frank, shameless assertion that they cannot support 
themselves. The Danes left a " rum fund " that is designed to aid all 
those who " have seen better days," and to judge by the applicants the 
entire population ranks itself in that category. The native woman 
clerk at the " West End " police station does not hesitate to give any 
one, even the four-dollars-a-day sugar-porters on the wharves, a certifi- 
cate that he is unable to pay for medical attention, though the navy 
doctors' fees are nominal and, even when they are paid, go into the 
colonial treasury. The admiral-governor gave a reception to the natives. 
Food was provided for five hundred — and was carried off by the first 
hundred street women and urchins who surged through the door. Next 
day a large crowd came to demand their share, saying they had got 
nothing the day before. One of the " labor leaders " told the negroes 
of St. Croix to hide their mahogany bedsteads and phonographs and 
sleep on drygoods boxes while the congressional committee was 
scheduled to visit the island. Of the entire crowd appearing before 
that committee not one had the general good of the islands on his 
lips, but all came with some petty personal complaint or request. 

In short our new wards want all they can get out of us. They want 
Uncle Sam to provide them with schools, with sanitation, with irriga- 
tion, with galvanized hill-sides, with roads — even in St. Croix, which 
has better highways than almost any State in the Union — with public 
markets, with libraries, with means of public transportation, with any- 
thing else which, in his unsophisticated generosity, he chooses to give, 
so long as he does not require them to contribute their own means and 
labor to that end. The colonial council of St. Croix " hopes means will 
be found to get Congress to appropriate a half million a year, a sum far 



IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS 335 

beyond our own means, so that we can live up to the high ideals of our 
great American nation." It never seems to occur to them that the 
schools, libraries, and streets in our cities are paid for by the inhabitants 
thereof ; they have the popular view of Uncle Sam as the world's Santa 
Claus. Yet many of the very members of that council have made 
fortunes in St. Croix and probably could themselves pay a large part 
of the sum demanded without any more difficulty than the average 
American finds in paying his taxes. Naive as they are, the Virgin 
Islanders can scarcely expect Americans to adopt them and never let 
them work or want again, yet they talk as if they had some such 
thought in mind. Or, as a congressman put it during a public hearing, 
" I doubt whether the farmers of my State of Kansas will be willing 
to get up at four all summer and pay money into the federal treasury 
so that you can sleep until nine in the morning and stroll in the park the 
rest of the day." 

There is no reason why the Virgin-Islanders should not be sufficiently 
taxed to support their own schools and other requirements. Even if 
St. Thomas is now largely barren, many of its shopkeepers are steadily 
growing wealthy. The Danish planters of St. Croix send fortunes 
home to Denmark every year ; at the present price of sugar they alone 
should be able easily to contribute a sum equal to that they are demand- 
ing from Congress. Should not even dollar-a-day negroes pay some- 
thing in taxes? It might develop their civic spirit. The Virgin- 
Islanders need many things, it is true ; but there are millions living in, 
and paying taxes to, the United States who have by no means what al- 
most every Virgin-Islander has, or could have for a little exertion. 
The future of the islands depends largely on whether or not we succumb 
to our national tendency to make our wards mendicants for life, or give 
them a start and let them work their own way through the college of 
civilization. 

Whenever I look back upon our new possessions I remember a sig- 
nificant little episode that took place during our first day in St. Thomas. 
A negro woman was sitting a short way up one of the great street 
stairways that climb the hills of Charlotte Amalie. A descending 
friend paused to ask her what was the matter, and she replied in that 
slow, whining singsong peculiar to the community : 

" Me knees jes wilfully refuse to carry me up dem steps." 

That is the trouble with most of the Virgin-Islanders. Their own 
knees jes wilfully refuse to carry them up the stairway of civilization. 
They will have to be lifted — or booted. 



THE BRITISH WEST INDIES 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 

ONCE he has reached our Virgin Islands, the traveler down the 
stepping-stones of the West Indies has left his worst experi- 
ences behind him. For while connections are rare and pre- 
carious between the large islands of the north Caribbean, the tiny ones 
forming its eastern boundary are favored with frequent and comfort- 
able intercommunication. Several steamship lines from the north make 
St. Thomas their first stop, and pausing a day or two in every island 
of any importance beyond, give the through traveler all the time he can 
spend to advantage in all but three or four of the Lesser Antilles. 
In these he can drop off for a more extended exploration and catch 
the next steamer a week or two later. 

A twelve-hour run from St. Croix, with a glimpse of the tiny Dutch 
islands of Saba and St. Eustatius, peering above the sea like drowning 
volcanoes, brought us to what the British so familiarly call St. Kitts. 
Columbus named it St. Christopher, one legend having it that he dis- 
covered it on his own patron saint's day, another that he saw in its 
form a resemblance to that worthy carrying in his arms the infant 
Jesus. The resemblance is not apparent to the critical eye, but the ad- 
mirals of those days, you recall, were not compelled to take their grape- 
juice unfermented. Besides, we must not be too hard upon the busy 
" old man " of the caravel fleet. With a sailor thrusting his head into 
the cabin every hour or so to say, '* Another island, vuestra merced; 
what shall we call it ? " it was natural that the Genoese, having no 
modern novels at hand, should curse his gout and hobble across to the 
saints' calendar on the opposite bulkhead. 

St. Kitts has more nearly the form of a heaping plate of curry and 
rice — curious this should not have occurred to the galley-fed seaman — 
culminating in Mt. Misery, four thousand and some feet high, with an 
eight hundred foot crater nicely proportioned to hold the curry and still 
steaming with clouds of vapor that habitually conceal its summit. From 
the shores to the steeper heights of the mountain the swiftly sloping 
island is covered with sugar-cane; above that the woods are said to 

339 



340 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

be full of monkeys, descendants of the pets which British soldiers 
brought with them when St. Kitts was a bone of contention between 
the French and the English. With one slight exception, this and the 
neighboring island of Nevis are the only West Indies inhabited by our 
racial ancestors, which are so troublesome that their direct descendants 
below have given up trying to plant their gardens more than half-way 
up the mountains. 

Though St. Kitts was the first island of the West Indies to be settled 
by the English, antedating even ultra-British Barbados in that regard 
by nearly two years, its capital bears the French name of Basse Terre. 
It is an uninteresting town of some seven thousand inhabitants, scarcely 
one in a hundred of whom boast of a family tree wholly free from 
African graftings, and most of them living in unpainted, weather- 
blackened, shingle cabins hidden away in the forests of cocoanut palms. 
Even the larger houses in the center of town are chiefly built of clap- 
boards or shingles, painted only by the elements, and with narrow 
little eaves that give them the air of wearing hats several sizes too 
small for them. The sums that are uselessly squandered on window- 
glass would easily suffice to give the entire town a sadly needed coating 
of paint, were it not that all such improvements are taxed out of exist- 
ence, as in most of the British West Indies. The only pleasant spot in 
town is a kind of Spanish plaza run wild, generously shaded with royal 
palms and spreading tropical trees, beneath which the grass stands ankle- 
high and hens pilot their broods about among the brown windrows of 
fallen leaves. Its unshaven condition rather enhances a certain rustic 
beauty that is not marred by an unexpectedly artistic old stone foun- 
tain in its center. Beyond the last lopsided negro hovels Basse Terre 
is surrounded by cane-fields, with Mt. Misery piled into the sky close 
behind them. 

We had the misfortune to first land in British territory on a Sunday. 
Basse Terre was as dead as if a general funeral were just over. It was 
not simply that we bemoaned with the tourist-minded fellow-country- 
men from the steamer the fact that every " Liquor Store " was tight 
and genuinely closed; the dreary lifelessness of the whole place got on 
our nerves. The very trade wind seemed to refrain from any un- 
necessary exertion; the citizens appeared to have given even their 
minds a holiday and replied to the simplest questions with a vacant 
stare. It was a " holy day " as truly as a French or Spanish Sunday 
is a " day of feast," or " festival." I imagine heaven is much like an 
English community on a Sunday — so piously dull that a new inmate 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 341 

would soon be on his knees imploring the gatekeeper to let him go 
to the only other available place. 

At eleven o'clock four species of church service broke out, the 
Anglican, Catholic, Moravian, and what a black policeman in a white 
blouse and helmet and the deliberate airs of a London " bobby " referred 
to in a Sunday whisper as the " Whistling." We went. One was 
forced to, in self-defense and for the utter absence of any other form 
of amusement. Then we understood why the community could endure 
the apparent lack of recreation and exercise of its deadly Sabbath. 
Negroes striving to maintain the cold, calm, rather bored English man- 
ner from opening hymn to benediction supplied the former, and the 
ups and downs of the Anglican service furnished the latter. 

We found St. Kitts more down-at-heel, more indolent, less self- 
relying than even our Virgin Islands. The shingle shacks of Basse 
Terre were more miserable than those of St. Thomas ; the swarms of 
negroes loafing under the palm trees about them were as ragged as they 
were lazy and insolent. Conrad's 4l Nigger of the Narcissus," you may 
recall, came from St. Kitts. His replica, except in the genuineness of 
his ailment, could be seen in any patch of shade. A white stranger 
strolling through the poorer section was the constant target of foul 
language and even more loathsome annoyances from both sexes and 
all ages; in the center of town his footsteps were constantly dogged 
by clamoring urchins who replied to the slightest protest with streams 
of curses even in the presence of white residents and the serenely un- 
conscious negro policemen. The inhabitants were incorrigible beggars, 
from street loafers to church wardens ; even the island postmaster 
begged, under the pretense of selling a historical pamphlet; the country 
people left their " work " in the fields to shout for alms from the 
passer-by. 

A highway encircles the island, which is twenty-three miles long and 
five wide. It flanks Brimstone Hill, sometimes called the " Gibraltar of 
the West Indies " in memory of the part it played in the wars between 
the French and English for the control of the Caribbean. Cane-fields 
spread with monotonous sameness on either side of the moderately well- 
kept roads, with here and there an old stone tower that was once a 
windmill and what seems many chimneys to one who recalls how seldom 
two are seen in the same horizon in Cuba. On the whole, the island 
is not to be compared with St. Croix; despite its abundance of sugar 
it has a poverty-stricken air, for St. Kitts seems to have lost its " pep," 
if ever it had any. 



342 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

It took two days to unload our one-day's cargo in the harbor of Basse 
Terre. The local stevedores were on strike and their places had been 
taken by less experienced men from the neighboring island of Nevis. 
This had magnified the constant enmity between the St. Kittens — or 
whatever is the proper term — and the inhabitants of "that other 
country," as they called it ; but it was an enmity without violence, 
except of words, torrents of words in what close observers assert are 
two distinct dialects, though the islands are separated only by a narrow 
channel. The strikers, to all appearances, felt they had won their chief 
aim by being allowed to lie on their backs in the shade of the cocoanut 
palms. 

The steamer's loss was my gain, for the delay gave me time to visit 
the island Columbus named " Nieve " from the snow-like clouds hover- 
ing about it. Open sailing scows, perhaps three times the size of a 
lifeboat, were constantly plying across the bay between the two capitals. 
The wind was on the beam in both directions, and a dozen times I was 
convinced that the waves that splashed continuously over the leeward 
gunwale of the creaking old tub would fill her at the next squall sweep- 
ing through the deep channel between the islands. But each time the 
simple son of Nevis at the tiller met my questioning gaze with " Not 
blow too bad to-day, boss," now and then adding the reassuring infor- 
mation that several boats were lost here every year. High on the wind- 
ward gunwale the plunging of the crude vessel was exhilarating in 
spite of the apparent danger, but the negro women in their flashy 
dresses, tin bracelets, and much cheap jewelry, who sprawled together 
in the bottom of the boat in supreme indifference to the bilge-water 
and filth that sloshed back and forth over them seemed to find nothing 
agreeable in the experience. 

The craft half righted herself at length under the lee of the island, 
heaped up into the clouds in similar but more abrupt and compact form 
than St. Kitts. One scarcely needed to go ashore to see the place, so 
nicely were its sights spread out on the steeply tilted landscape. Like 
its neighbor it was but slightly wooded on its lower slopes, but made 
up for this by the dense vegetation of its monkey-infested heights. One 
made out a few groves of cocoanuts, patches of cotton, and green 
stretches of sugar-cane, with here and there a windmill tower, one of 
which still survived, its slowly turning arms giving a mild suggestion 
of the Azores. Charlestown soon appeared out on the end of a low 
point, a modest little town with a few red roofs peering through the 
cocoanut trees. Gingertown, five miles in the interior, and the village 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 343 

of Newcastle farther down the coast are the only other places of any 
size, though the island is everywhere well populated. Time was when 
Nevis was a famous watering place for Europe and America, with 
thermal baths and medicinal waters, and an important capital named 
Jamestown, from which all this region of the Caribbean was ruled. 
But the city was destroyed one day by an earthquake and submerged 
beneath the sea, where some of its coral-encrusted ruins can still be 
seen not far from the shore. Natural causes led to the island's gradual 
isolation, and to-day, though its hot baths are exploited by an American 
owned hotel, it becomes highly excited at the arrival of a stranger from 
the outside world. 

Charlestown had little of the insolence of St. Kitts, though it was 
by no means free from beggars. Its masses were more naive in manner, 
even more ragged of garb. Nine pence a day is the average adult male 
wage of even those who succeed in finding work. Obeah, or African 
witchcraft, seemed still to maintain a hold, for even the native bank 
clerk who piloted me about town acknowledged a belief in certain forms 
of it. Two or three blocks from the little triangular park that marks 
the center of town are the ruins of a gray stone building in which 
Alexander Hamilton is reputed to have been born. British visitors are 
more interested in the house where Nelson lived and the little church 
in which he was married to the widow Nisbet, two miles up the sloping 
hillside. Love for England does not greatly flourish in Nevis, if one 
may take surface indications as evidence. 

" We are ruled over by an autocrat, a white Barbadian magistrate," 
complained an islander of the better class, while the group about him 
nodded approval. " England takes everything from us and does noth- 
ing for us. If it were not for the prohibition that would come with it, 
we would be glad to see the island under American rule." 

A forty-mile run during the night brought us to Antigua. Steamers 
anchor so far off shore that a government launch is required to do the 
work performed in most of the Lesser Antilles by rowboats. For 
though there is a splendid double harbor on the opposite side of the 
island, the English cling to their invariable Caribbean rule of building 
the capital and only city on the leeward shore. Two pretty headlands 
are passed on the way in, the more prominent of them occupied by a 
leper asylum ; both are crowned by fortresses dating back to the days 
when England fought to maintain her hold on the West Indies. From 
the bay St. John's presents an agreeable picture in the morning sun- 



344 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

light, an ancient two-towered cathedral bulking above the greenery con- 
stituting the most conspicuous landmark. It is much more of a town 
than Basse Terre, though with the same wooden, shingled, often un- 
painted houses, and wide, unattractive, right-angled streets. What 
energy it may once have had seems largely to have departed, and for 
all its -size it has the air of a half-forgotten village. Its shops open 
at seven, close from nine to ten for breakfast, and put up their shutters 
for the day at four. On closer inspection the cathedral proves to be 
two churches, one of wood enclosed within another of stone, as a pro- 
tection against earthquakes. The negro women of the market-place are 
given to the display of brilliant calicos, but the population as a whole 
has little of the color, — except in complexion — the dignity, and that 
suggestion of Gallic grace of the French islanders. 

Antigua, thirteen by nine miles, is lower and less mountainous than 
St. Kitts, being of limestone rather than volcanic formation, with 
less luxuriant vegetation, having been almost wholly denuded of its 
forests. In consequence, it suffers somewhat for lack of rainfall, 
though it is almost everywhere cultivated, and offers many a pretty 
vista of rolling landscape, usually with a patch of sea at the end of 
it. Sugar-cane is by far its most important product, though corn-fields 
here and there break the lighter green monotony, and limes and onions 
are piled high in crates on St. John's water-front. The island roads 
are tolerable. Automobiles, mainly of the Ford variety, make it pos- 
sible for the traveler to see its " sights " in a few hours with less 
damage to the exchequer than in many of the West Indies. Women 
in rather graceless colored turbans are more numerous than men in the 
cane-fields, where wages average 4^ pence per hundred holes of cane, 
whether for planting, hoeing, or cutting, making the daily wage of 
the majority about fifteen cents. What they do with all that money is 
a problem we found no time to solve, thought there were evidences that 
a fair proportion of it is invested in native rum. Like all the world, 
Antigua has had her share of labor troubles during the past few years. 
Two seasons ago much cane was burned by the incensed workers, but 
the killing of several and the wounding of some thirty more by govern- 
ment troops has settled the wage problem on its old basis. Though 
many abandoned estates, with the familiar square brick chimneys and 
armless windmill towers, dot the landscape, two sugar factories to-day 
consume virtually all the cane. They are rather old-fashioned institu- 
tions, with no such pretty, well-planned bateys and comfortable em- 
ployee-houses as are to be found in Cuba and Porto Rico. The hauling 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 345 

is chiefly done by tippy two-wheeled carts, drawn by mules in tandem, 
occasionally by oxen, specially designed, it would seem, to spill their 
loads each time an automobile forces them to the edge of the road. 
Mangos and bamboo, in certain sections clumps of cactus and patches of 
that troublesome thorny vegetation which the Cubans call aroma, are 
the chief landscape decorations, except on the tops of the scrub-fuzzy, 
rather than forested hills. Shacks covered with shingles from mudsill 
to roof-tree, interspersed with fewer thatched and once whitewashed 
huts, all of them somewhat less miserable than those of St. Kitts, house 
the country people in scattered formation or occasional clusters bearing 
such misnomers as xA.ll Saints' Village. Like most of the Lesser 
Antilles, Antigua was once French, but it has retained less of the patois 
than the other islands of similar history. 

The goal of most mere visitors to Antigua is English Harbor on the 
windward coast, two almost landlocked blue basins in which Nelson re- 
fitted his fleet in preparation for the battle of Trafalgar. Here stand 
several massive stone buildings, occupied now only by the negro care- 
taker and his family. In the great stone barracks is a patch of wall 
decorated by the none too artistic hand of the present King George, 
then a sub-lieutenant in the British navy, wishing in vari-colored large 
letters " A Merry Christmas 2 You All," the space being reverently 
covered now by a padlocked pair of shutters. More popular with the 
romantic-minded is the immense anchor serving as gravestone of one, 
Lieutenant Peterson. The lieutenant, runs the story, was the rival of 
his commanding officer for the hand of the island belle. On the eve of 
a naval ball he was ordered not to offer the young lady his escort. He 
appeared with her at the height of the festivities, however, she having 
declined in his favor the attentions of the commander, whereupon the 
latter shot the lieutenant for disobeying orders and caused him to be 
buried that same night in the barracks compound. 

Patriotism for the empire to which they belong is not one of the 
chief characteristics of the Antiguans. Indeed, there is " no love 
whatever " for England, if we are to believe most of those with whom I 
talked on the subject. 

" There never was any, even in the old days," asserted a man whose 
parents emigrated from England half a century ago. " Before the 
war," he continued, " England would not buy her sugar in the West 
Indies because she could get it cheaper from the beet-growers in Ger- 
many and Austria, thanks to their government bounty. The sugar we 
sent to England often lay on the wharves over there for months, until 



346 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

we had to send money to pay wharfage and storage, and feed our sugar 
to the hogs here at home. Once we enjoyed home rule; now our laws 
are made by the Secretary for the West Indies in London, who thinks 
we wear breech-clouts and speak some African dialect. They take 
everything from us in taxes and do nothing for us in return. Our 
governor thinks his only duty is to hold us down. He tries to be a 
little tin god, permits no one else to ride in the public launch with 
him when he goes out to a ship, and all that sort of thing. He came 
here two years ago from a similar position in one of our African 
colonies, where he was accustomed to see everyone bring him gifts and 
bow their heads in the sand whenever he passed. He got a surprise 
when he landed here. Except for a few nigger policemen, no one 
paid him any attention whatever, except that the drunken fellows 
shouted after him in the streets and called him foul names. We had no 
conscription here, yet we sent a large contingent. The well-to-do whites 
paid their way home to enlist ; the poor ones went over with the niggers 
and were slowly picked out after they got over there. And England 
has not done a thing for a man of them. The blacks are angry because 
they got no promotion and all the dirtiest jobs. Mighty few of us 
would go again to fight for the blooming Empire." 

Antigua is the capital of what the British call, for political purposes, 
the Leeward Islands, comprising all their holdings between Santa Cruz 
and Martinique. Geographically this is a misnomer, the real leeward 
islands being the Greater Antilles, from Cuba to Porto Rico inclusive, 
and all the Lesser Antilles the windward islands, as the Spaniards 
recognized and still maintain. But the unnatural division serves the 
purpose for which it was made. St. John's is the seat of the governor 
and the archbishop of all the group, with the principal prison and 
asylum. Anguilla, far to the north, near the Dutch-French island of 
St. Martin, is of coral formation, comparatively low and flat. The 
same may be said of Barbuda, large as Antigua and reputed to have 
gone back to nature under the improvident descendants of the slaves 
of the Codrington family that long reigned supreme upon it. Montser- 
rat, on the other hand, is very mountainous, a flat-topped, pyramidal 
fragment of earth thirty-five square miles in extent, its lower slopes 
planted with limes and cacao, its upper reaches forest-clad. White 
ribbons of roads set forth from Plymouth, the capital, in what looks 
like a determined effort to scale the precipitous heights, but soon give 
up the attempt. The population of the island is mainly negro-Irish, 
it having been settled by emigrants from the " Old Sod," so that to this 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 347 

day Irish names predominate, freckled red-heads with African features 
are numerous, and the inhabitants are noted throughout the West Indies 
for their brogue and their gift of blarney. 

Dominica, the southernmost and largest of the misnamed Leeward 
Islands, is also entitled to several other superlatives. Most of the 
West Indies boast themselves the " Queen of the Antilles," but none 
with more justice than this tiny Porto Rico isolated between the two 
principal islands of " French America." It is the highest of the Lesser 
Antilles, Mt. Diablotin stretching 5314 feet into the tropical sky; the 
wettest, being habitually surrounded by blue-black clouds that pour 
forth their deluges by night or by day, in or out of season, even when 
all the sky about it is translucent blue ; and the world's greatest enemy 
of the scurvy, for it produces most of that fruit which has given the 
British sailor the nickname of " limy." Incidentally, it is the most 
difficult of the West Indies in which to travel. 

Roseau, the capital, sits right out on the Caribbean, the mountains 
climbing directly, without an instant's hesitation, into the sky behind it. 
They are as sheer beneath water as above it and the steamer anchors 
within an easy stone's throw of the wharves. Boatmen in curious 
little board canoes, showing their wooden ribs within and bearing such 
French names as " Dieu Donne," quickly surround the new arrival, 
some of them bent on carrying her passengers ashore at a shilling a 
head, others to dive for pennies thrown into this deepest-blue of seas, 
which is yet so transparent that both coin and swimmer can be perfectly 
seen as far down as lungs will carry them. Boats of the same quaint 
structure and only slightly larger jockey for position along the ship's 
side to receive the cargo from her hatches. They are unreliable and 
poorly adapted for the purpose, but their owners stick together in pro- 
tecting their monopoly and every modern lighter brought to Dominica 
has invariably been scuttled within a week. Almost within the shadow 
of the steamer other men are standing stiffly erect in the extreme stern 
of their fishing canoes, steering them by almost imperceptible move- 
ments of their single crude paddle, while their companions cast their 
nets or throw stones within them to lure the fish to the surface. 
Immense hauls they make, too, without going a hundred yards from 
the shore. How many fish there must be in the sea when thousands 
of fishermen can ply their trade about each of these West Indian 
stepping-stones the year round and come home every day laden to the 
gunwales with their catches ! 



348 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Roseau is scarcely more than a village. It is so small that all its 
business is carried on within plain sight from the steamer's deck, 
though it strives to look very important with its few two-story stone 
buildings, like a Briton in foreign parts aware that he must uphold the 
national dignity unassisted. It is less given to wooden structures than 
many of its rivals, and has a more aged, solid air, at least along the 
water-front. An age-softened gray stone church that looks almost 
Spanish, with an extraordinary width within, like a market-hall filled 
with pews, and bilingual signs above the confessionals bearing the names 
of French priests, seems conscious of its mastery over the few small 
Protestant chapels. Higher still is one of the most magnificent little 
botanical gardens in the world, with hundreds of tropical specimens 
arranged with the unobtrusive orderliness of an English park. 

I visited Dominica twice, and on the second occasion, having from 
early morning until midnight, hired a horse to ride across the island. 
Roseau Valley, a great sloping glen like a cleft in the mountains, climbs 
swiftly upward to the clouds behind the town, a rock-boiling river, 
surprisingly large for so small an island, pouring down it. At the 
bridge across the stream on the edge of town is what claims to be the 
greatest lime-juice factory on earth. I use both words with misgiving, 
for it is no more a factory in our sense of the term than the white lumps 
it ships away to a scurvy-dreading world are juice. Toward this a 
constant stream of limes, which we would be more apt to call lemons, 
is descending. Women and girls come trotting down out of the moun- 
tains with bushel baskets of them, now and then sitting down on a 
boulder to rest but never troubling to take the incredible load off their 
heads. Donkeys with enormous straw saddle-bags heaped high with 
limes pick their way more cautiously down the steep slope. Occa- 
sionally even a man deigns to jog to town with a load of the fruit. 
They lie everywhere in great yellow heaps under the low trees; they 
weigh down the usually rain-dripping branches. Yet when they have 
been grown and picked and carried all the way to town, they sell for 
a mere seven shillings a barrel ! Small wonder the human pack-horses 
and even the growers are more extraordinarily ragged than any other 
West Indians outside of Haiti. 

Cacao plants, too, are piled up the steeps on either side of the roaring 
river, for Dominica has that constant humidity and more than frequent 
rainfall they love so well. The unbroken density of the greenery is 
one, perhaps the chief, charm of the valley, as of all the island. No- 
where in all the climb does the eye make out the suggestion of a clear- 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 349 

ing. Where man has not pitched his lime or cacao orchards, or planted 
his tiny garden patch, nature forces the fertile black soil to produce 
to its utmost capacity. It is an un-American density, as of an Oriental 
jungle, all but completely concealing the miserable little huts tucked 
away in it all over the lower hillsides ; it makes up for the constant 
succession of heavy showers that belie the sunny promises of the town 
and harbor below. For the mountains of Dominica have an annual 
rainfall of three hundred inches, twenty-five feet of water a year! 

There are forty automobiles on the island of lemons, but they do not 
venture far from home. The highway up the valley lasts a bare three 
miles before it dwindles to a mountain trail that struggles constantly 
upward, now steeply along the brink of the river far below, now in 
stony zig-zags that make no real progress, for all their pretense, except 
in altitude. One has a curiously shut-in feeling, as if there were no 
escape from the mighty ravine except by the narrow, slippery path 
underfoot, which is, indeed, the case. Not even the jet black in- 
habitants inured to mountain-climbing from birth, have attempted to 
scale the heights by more direct paths than this zigzag trail up the roof- 
steep bottom of the gorge. They speak among themselves a " Creole " 
as incomprehensible, even to one familiar with French, as that of Haiti, 
though they babbled a bit of English that seemed to grow less fluent 
and extensive with every mile away from the capital. There the white 
stranger was subjected to an insolence and clamoring at his heels in- 
ferior only in volume to that of St. Kitts ; up here in the mountains 
the passers-by yielded the trail and raised their ragged headgear with a 
rustic politeness that would have been more charming had it not almost 
invariably been followed by " A penny, please, sir " from both sexes 
and all ages. For all their mountaineer diffidence, they are so given 
to stealing one another's crops that shops throughout the island are 
" Licensed to Sell Protected Produce," that the police may have a means 
of detecting contraband. Perhaps they are scarcely to be blamed for 
their light-fingered habits, with wages that rarely reach the lofty height 
of a shilling a day. 

The horse had leisurely English manners and the deliberate, loose- 
kneed action of a St. Thomas waiter, so that we made far less progress 
than his rangy form had promised. He showed, too, little of that en- 
durance and mountain wisdom for which the far smaller animals of 
tropical America are noted. We reached the crest of the island at last, 
however, and paused on the edge of a small fresh-water lake said to fill 
the crater of an extinct volcano. Sedge-grass surrounded it and dense 



350 ■ ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

vegetation framed it on every side, but there was nothing remarkable 
about it, except, perhaps, to the Dominicans. But the wealth of flora 
was well worth the excursion. Tree-ferns, ferns large and small, wild 
bananas, lime-trees, clumps of bamboo, and a score of other plants 
and trees which only a botanist with tropical experience could name, 
completely concealed the earth, as the trunks of all the larger species 
were hidden under climbing parasites with immense leaves, and even 
the sheer banks were covered with densest vegetation. 

A fog, white and luminous, yet impenetrable to the eye at more than 
twenty yards, covered all the island top. I urged the animal down a 
far steeper, more stony, trail than that we had climbed, cut deeper than 
a horseman's head into the red-black mountainside and pitching head- 
long downward into the foggy void. A half hour of utter stillness, 
broken now and then by the brief song of the solitaire and the constant 
stumbling of the horse's hoofs over the stones, brought us suddenly 
to the edge of the cloud, with a magnificent view of the jagged northern 
coast edged by the white breakers of the Atlantic. A few negroes 
again appeared, climbing easily upward, carrying their shoes on their 
heads, an excellent place to wear them at present prices. Now and 
then an aged, carelessly constructed hut peered out from the teeming 
wilderness, but the sense of the primeval, the uninhabitated, the un- 
known to man, brooded over all the scene despite these and the stony 
trail underfoot. 

Halfway down I met two Carib Indians, easily distinguishable from 
the bulk of the inhabitants by their features and color. They were 
short and muscular, with more of the aggressive air of the Mexican 
highlander than the slinking demeanor of the South American aborig- 
ines. They carried their home-made baskets full of some native 
produce on their shoulders, rather than on their heads, and apparently 
spoke but little English. They came from the Carib reservation on the 
north coast, the only one now left in all the West Indies over which, 
except for the four larger islands, their man-eating ancestors ruled 
supreme until long after the discovery. When at length, after long 
warfare, England entered into a treaty with them, they were given two 
patches of territory for their own. But the eruption of Soufriere in 
St. Vincent in 1902 destroyed the colony on that island, and to-day the 
three hundred of Dominica are the only ones left, and barely "forty of 
these, it is said, are of pure blood. They live at peace with their neigh- 
bors, make baskets, catch fish, and are noted for their industry, as wild 
tribes go, in agriculture. 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 351 

More than halfway down to sea-level huts began to grow frequent 
again, most of them completely covered with shingles and all of them 
devoid of any but the scantiest home-made furniture. Ragged, useless- 
looking inhabitants stood in the doorways staring at the extraordinary 
apparition of a white man, many of them calling out in cheerful voices 
for alms as I passed. Dominica is evidently an island without time- 
pieces; almost everyone I met wanted to know the hour, just why 
was not apparent, since time seemed to have less than no value to 
them. My watch having been stolen in Havana and I having declined 
to tempt West Indians again by buying another, I could not satisfy 
their curiosity. Besides, the Caribbean is no place in which to worry 
about time ; the fact that the sun rises and sets is all the division of 
eternity needed in such an African Eden. 

At Rosalie, an old-fashioned sugar-mill and a scattering of huts on 
the north coast, I made a calculation. The sun was high overhead; it 
could not be later than two; the map in my hand showed the distance 
around the eastern end of the island to be less than twice that over the 
mountain ; a coast road would be comparatively level and much to be 
preferred to another climb of 2500 feet on a jaded horse. Besides, I 
have a strong antipathy to returning the same way I have come. I 
made a few inquiries. The childlike inhabitants on this coast spoke 
almost no English and nothing that could easily be recognized as 
French, but they seemed to understand both tongues readily enough. I 
had only to ask if it were about four hours ride to the capital to be 
assured that such was the case. > It was not until too late that I realized 
they were giving me the answer they thought would please me best, like 
most uncivilized tribes, with perfect indifference to the facts of the case. 
Any distance I chose to assume in my question was invariably the exact 
distance ; when I awoke to my error and took to asking direct instead 
of leading questions, the reply was invariably a soft " Yes, sir," with 
an instant readiness to change to " No, sir," if anything in my manner 
suggested that I preferred a negative answer. But by this time I was 
too far along the coast-road to turn back. 

I had only myself to blame for what soon promised to be a pretty 
predicament. Certainly I had traveled enough in uncivilized countries 
to know such people cannot be depended upon for even approximate 
accuracy in matters of distance or time. I surely was mountain- 
experienced enough to realize that an island as small and as lofty as 
Dominica could have but little level land, even along the coast. As a 
matter of fact it had virtually none at all. Never did the atrocious trail 



352 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

find a hundred yards of flat going. One after another, in dogged, 
insistent, disheartening succession, the great forest-clad buttresses of 
the island plunged steeply down to the sea, forcing the stony path to 
claw its way upward or make enormous detours around the intervening 
hollows, only to pitch instantly down again from each hard-earned 
height into a mighty ravine, beyond which another appalling mountain- 
wall blocked the horizon immediately ahead. To make matters worse, 
the horse began to show all too evident signs of giving out. In vain 
did I lash him with such weapons as I could snatch from the jungle- 
wall alongside, not daring to take time to dismount and seek a better 
cudgel. Steadily, inevitably, his pace, none too good at the best, de- 
creased. By what I took to be four o'clock he could not be urged out 
of a slow walk, even on the rare bits of level going; by five he was 
merely crawling, his knees visibly trembling, coming every few yards 
to a complete halt from which he could be driven only by all the punish- 
ment I could inflict upon him. His condition was one to draw tears, 
but it was no time to be compassionate. The steamer was sailing at 
midnight. It would be the last one in that direction for two weeks. 
Rachel was waiting to join me on 'it at Martinique and continue to Bar- 
bados. No one on board knew I had gone on an excursion into the hills, 
nor even that I had left the steamer. My possessions would be found 
scattered about my stateroom ; by the time the ship reached Martinique 
it would be assumed that I had fallen overboard or suffered some 
equally pleasant fate. I had barely the equivalent of five dollars on my 
person, not an extra pair of socks, not even a tooth-brush — and the 
Dominica cable was broken. Clearly it was no time to spare the 
cudgel. 

But it was of no use. Near sunset the horse took to stumbling to 
his knees at every step. For long minutes he stood doggedly in hi 
tracks, trembling from head to foot. The sweat of fatigue, as well as 
heat, ran in rivulets down his flanks. I tumbled off and tried to leac 
him. We were climbing another of those incessant, interminable but- 
tresses. With all my strength I could only drag him a few creeping 
steps at a time. After each short advance he sat down lifelessl) 
on his haunches. If I abandoned him in the trail there was no 
knowing whether the owners would ever see him again ; certainly they 
would not the saddle and bridle, and the owners were a simple mulatto 
family of Roseau who could ill bear such a loss. But I could scarcely 
risk further delay. The sun was drowning in the Caribbean ; the hazy 
form of Martinique thirty miles away was still on my port bow, so 




Roseau, capital of beautiful Dominica 







A woman of Dominica bringing a load of limes down from the mountain 



' 




Kingston, capital of St. Vincent 




Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbados, with its statue of Nelson 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 353 

to speak, showing that I had not yet turned the point of the island, that 
I was not yet halfway to Roseau. It was stupid of me not to have 
realized before that Dominica, for all its scant 35,000 ignorant in- 
habitants, was almost as large as the French island in the offing, and 
that to encircle one end of it was a stiff all-day job. 

I was on the point of abandoning the animal when I caught sight of 
a man climbing the trail far ahead of us, the first person I had seen 
in more than an hour. I shouted, and for some time fancied he had 
dashed off into the wilderness out of fear. Then a break in the vege- 
tation showed him again, and this time he halted. We reached him at 
last, a stodgy negro youth in the remnants of hat, shirt, and trousers 
who stood at attention, like a soldier, at the extreme edge of the trail, 
an expression between fear and respectful attention on his stupid black 
countenance. 

" How far is it to Roseau? " I panted. 

" Yes, sir," he replied, seeming to poise himself for a dive into the 
jungle void behind him. 

" How many miles to Roseau? " I repeated, " five or ten or — " 
' Yes, sir," he reiterated, shifting his mammoth bare feet uneasily. 

" I want to know the distance to the city," I cried, unwisely raising 
my voice in my haste and thereby all but causing him to bolt. " Can 
I make it in six hours ? " 

" Yes, sir," he answered, quickly. Then, evidently seeing that I was 
not pleased with the answer, he added hastily, " N — No, sir." 

"Est-cc qn' on pent le faire en six hcures? " I hazarded, but he 
seemed to understand French even less than English and stared at me 
mutely. The brilliant idea of wasting no more time passed through the 
place my mind should have been. I snatched out my note-book and 
pencil. 

" What 's your name ? " I asked. " Can you write ? " 

He could, to the extent of laboriously and all but illegibly penciling 
his name, to which I added his address, a tiny hamlet up in the moun- 
tains. I explained the situation to him briefly in words of one syllable. 
He seemed to follow me. At least he answered " Yes, sir " at the end 
of each sentence. 

" You will take the horse to the police-station in Grand Bay," I 
specified, having gathered from my map and his monosyllables that this 
was the next town. " I will tell the police there what to do with him, 
and I will leave five shillings with them to give you if you bring horse, 
saddle and bridle, and do not try to ride him on the way." 



354 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

" Yes sir," he replied, taking the reins I held out to him, and I turned 
and fled into the swiftly descending night. 

I have climbed many mountains in my day, but none that were as 
wearying as that endless succession of lofty ridges up the stony sides 
of which I stumbled hour after hour in a darkness as black as the 
bottom of a well, only to plunge instantly down again into another 
mighty, invisible ravine. Several times I lost the trail ; how I kept it 
at all is a mystery. As I strained forward with every ounce of strength 
within me I caught myself thanking fortune, or whoever has my par- 
ticular case on his books, that I had been a tramp all my days and had 
kept myself fit for such an ordeal. Now and then I passed through a 
" town," that is, what voices told me was a scattered collection of huts 
hidden in the vegetation and the night on either side of the trail, for a 
hundred yards or two, along which a few ghostlike figures of negroes in 
white garments dodged aside at sound of my shod footsteps, each time 
soon giving way again to the deep stillness of an uninhabited wilderness, 
broken only by the monotonous chorus of jungle insects. Which of 
these places was Grand Bay I had no time to inquire, much less batter 
my head against the native stupidity for sufficient time to find the police- 
station and make known my case to slow-witted black officials. I 
would think up some other way of meeting my obligations when I had 
accomplished the more pressing mission on hand. 

Once the trail came out on the very edge of the sea, crawling along 
under the face of a sheer towering cliff, the spray dashing up to my 
very feet; a dozen times it climbed what seemed almost perpendicu- 
larly into the invisible, starless sky above for what appeared to my 
wasting strength to be hours. I had eaten a hasty breakfast on board 
early that morning. Four bananas was the sum total of food I had 
been able to get along the way. My thighs trembled like the legs of a 
foundering horse ; more than once my wobbling knees seemed on the 
very point of giving way beneath me. The rain had kindly held off 
all afternoon, an unusual boon in Dominica, but the pace I was forced to 
set had so drenched me in perspiration that it dripped in almost a 
stream from the end of my leather belt. 

Then all at once, at the top of an ascent I had told myself a score 
of times I could never make, the lights of Roseau burst upon me, far 
below yet seemingly no great distance away. There were a few lights 
in what seemed to be the harbor, but not enough of them to be sure 
they were those of a passenger-steamer. Yet hope suddenly stiffened 
my legs as starch does a wilted collar. The town quickly disappeared 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 355 

again as I plunged down a stony but wide highway that had suddenly 
grown up under my feet. Several times I was convinced it led some- 
where else than where I hoped, so incredibly interminable was the 
descent to the town that had seemed so near. Even when I caught 
sight of it again, where the road grew suddenly level, it lay far down 
the coast, as far, it seemed, as it had been from the top of the range. 
But the steamer was still there. I broke into a feeble run, for it could 
not possibly have been much short of midnight, but fell back into a walk 
when my legs had all but crumpled under me. Never had a small town 
seemed so interminably long. Once I passed a " nighthawk " and 
shouted a question at him over my shoulder. " About twelve," he re- 
plied, little suspecting the surge of despair his words sent through me. 
As luck would have it, one boatman had remained at the wharf in hope 
of a belated shilling. He got two. I had just begun to wring the 
perspiration out of my coat into my cabin washstand when a long 
blast of the siren and the chugging of the engines told me that we had 
gotten under way. 

Lest some ungentle reader carry away the impression that I had 
increased the slight disrepute in which Americans are held in Dominica 
— for our tourists land there frequently — may I add that I settled 
in full all my obligations there through the purser of the steamer on its 
return voyage? But to drop painful subjects and hark back to that 
other visit to Dominica. Then we left at noon, and Roseau settled back 
into another week's sleep. There were several pretty villages tucked 
away in the greenery along the shore, some of them with wide cobbled 
streets, though hardly a yard of level ground, and each with a church 
just peering above the fronds of the cocoanuts. A highway crawled 
as far as it was able along the coast beside us, but soon gave it up 
where the steep hills, looking like green plush, became precipitous moun- 
tains falling sheer into the sea, yet with low forests clinging everywhere 
to the face of them. Bit by bit the loveliest of the Caribbees, the most 
unbrokenly mountainous of the West Indies, shrunk away behind us. 
Tiny fishing boats with ludicrous little pocket-handkerchief sails ven- 
tured far out, now standing forth against the horizon on the crest of a 
wave, now completely lost from sight in a trough of the sea. But by 
this time Martinique was looming large on the port bow, and we were 
straining our eyes for the first glimpse of ruined St. Pierre. 

St. Lucia, largest of the British Windward Islands and a bare twenty- 
five miles south of Martinique, is the only one of the Lesser Antilles 



356 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

where the steamer ties up at the wharf. Castries, the capital, is situ- 
ated on the edge of what was once a volcano crater, but presents little 
else of interest to those who have seen its replica in several of the other 
islands. Like all the group to which it belongs politically, it was once 
French and still speaks a " Creole " jargon in preference to English. 
It, too, is mountainous, with a Soufriere that rises four thousand feet 
into the sky, and despite its thirty-five by twelve miles of extent, its 
population is as scanty and as unprogressive as that of Dominica. 
The most striking of its sights are the two pitons at the southern end 
of the island, cone-shaped peaks rising more than 2500 feet sheer out 
of the sea, as if they were the surviving summits of a Himalayan range 
that sank beneath the waves before the dawn of recorded history. 

The next of the stepping-stones is St. Vincent, for though Barbados, 
a hundred miles due east of it, intervenes in the steamer's itinerary, 
it is neither geographically, geologically, nor politically a member of the 
Windward group. St. Vincent was the last of the West Indies to come 
into possession of the white man, for here the fierce Caribs offered their 
last resistance and were conquered only by being literally driven into 
the sea. It is ruggedly mountainous and unbrokenly green with 
rampant vegetation, its jagged range cutting the sky-line like the teeth 
of a gigantic saw. It, too, has its Soufriere, which erupted on the 
afternoon before Pelee in Martinique, killing more than fifteen hundred 
and devastating one end of the island. Rain falls easily on St. Vincent, 
and even the capital is habitually humid and drenched with frequent 
showers. This is named Kingstown, and lies scattered along the shore 
at the foot of a wide valley sloping quickly upward to the jagged 
labyrinth of peaks about which black clouds playfully chase one 
another the year round. It is a gawky, ragged, rather insolent place of 
unenterprising negroes, with a few scrawny leather-skinned poor 
whites scattered among them. Some of these are of Portuguese origin, 
and there is a scattering of East Indians. So colorless is the place, 
except in scenic beauty, that the appearance of a woman of Martinique 
in full native regalia in its streets resembles a loud noise in a deep 
silence. Even the sea comes in with a slow, lazy szvo-ozv among the 
weather-blackened fishing boats that lie scattered along its beach. So 
quiet and peaceful is it everywhere out of sound of the clamoring 
market-place that it would seem an ideal spot in which to engage in 
intellectual labors, but there is no evidence that St. Vincent has ever 
enriched the world's art. 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 357 

Roads climb away from the capital into the pretty, steep hills that 
surround it, among which are tucked red-roofed estates and negro 
cabins. The island looks more prosperous in the country than in the 
town. Its cotton is said to be unsurpassed for the making of lace, 
and was selling at the time of our visit, for $2 a pound. In addition, 
it produces cotton-seed oil, arrow-root, cacao, and, above all, nutmegs. 
The nutmeg grows on a tree not unlike the plum in appearance — resi- 
dents of Vermont have no doubt seen it often — the fruit resembling 
a small apricot. Inside this is a large nut prettily veined with the red 
mace that is another of the island's exports, and the nut being cracked 
discloses a kernel which, dried and cured, is carried down from the 
hills in baskets on the heads of negroes and shipped to the outside 
world as the nutmeg of commerce. The natives, if the swarthy West 
Indians of to-day are entitled to that term, make also pretty little cov- 
ered baskets in all sizes, which sell for far less after the steamer has 
blown her warning whistle than when she has just arrived. 

The eight-hour run from St. Vincent to Grenada, capital of the 
Windward group, is close to the leeward of a scattered string of islands 
called the Grenadines, some of them, comparatively large, mountainous 
in their small way, others mere jagged bits of rock strewn at random 
along the edge of the Caribbean, all of them looking more or less dry 
and sterile. Grenada is rugged and beautiful, though it does not rival 
Dominica in either respect. It has variously beeir'called the " Isle of 
Spices," the " Planter's Paradise," and the " Island of Nutmegs." 
What claims to be the largest nutmeg plantation on earth ■ — the West 
Indians have something of our own tendency for superlatives — lies 
among its labyrinth of hills; it produces also cinnamon, cloves, ginger, 
and cacao. Though it is admittedly far more prosperous than St. 
Vincent, it shows few signs of cultivation from the sea, for none of its 
principal products in their growing state can be recognized from the 
forest and brush that cover many an uncleared West Indian isle. The 
high prices paid for nutmegs during the war, particularly by fruit pre- 
servers in the United States, has brought fortunes to many of its 
planters, despite the fact that the tree takes seven years to mature. 
Many of the negroes, too, own their small estates and increase their 
incomes by making jelly from the nutmeg fruit. Yet from the sea all 
this is hidden under a dense foliage that completely covers the nowhere 
level island. Along the geometrical white line of the beach are several 
villages ; higher up are seen only scattered huts and a few larger build- 



358 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ings, except where the two considerable towns of Goyave and Victoria 
break the pretty green monotony. 

But if Grenada must yield the palm for beauty to some of its neigh- 
bors, St. Georges, the capital, unquestionably presents the loveliest 
picture from the sea of any port in the Lesser Antilles, if not of the 
West Indies. Nestled among and piled up the green hills that terminate 
in a jagged series of peaks above, its often three-story houses pitched 
in stages one above the other, larger buildings crowning here and there 
a loftier eminence, the whole delightfully irregular and individualistic, 
it rouses even the jaded traveler to exclamations of pleasure. The 
steamer chugs placidly by, as if it had suddenly decided not to call, 
passes a massive old fortress, then suddenly swings inshore as though 
it had forgotten its limitation and aspires to climb the mountain heights. 
A narrow break in the rock wall opens before it, and it slides calmly 
into a magnificent little blue harbor and drops anchor so close to the 
shore that one can talk to the people on it in a conversational tone. 
Why the vessel does not tie up to the wharf and have done with it is 
difficult to understand, for the blue water seems fathoms deep up to the 
very edge of the quay. Strictly speaking, it is not a wharf at all, but 
one of the principal streets of the town, and passengers in their state- 
rooms have a sense of having moved into an apartment just across the 
way from the negro families who lean out of their windows watching 
with cheerful curiosity the activity on the decks below. 

The sun was just setting in a cloudless sky when we landed in St. 
Georges, yet we saw enough of it before darkness came to veil the now 
all too familiar negro slovenliness, though it could not disguise the 
concomitant odors. The same incessant cries for alms, the same heel- 
treading throngs of guides marked our progress, until we had shaken 
them off in a long tunnel through a mountain spur that connects the two 
sections of the water-front. For despite its distant loveliness, the town 
was overrun by the half-insolent, half-cringing black creatures who so 
mar all the Caribbean wonderland, until one is ready to curse the men 
of long ago who exterminated the aborigines and brought in their place 
this lowest species of the human family. On shore St. Georges was 
different only in its steep, cobbled streets and its rows of houses piled 
sheer one above another. Every other shop announced itself a " Dealer 
in Cacao and Nutmegs." In the clamoring throngs of venders squatted 
along the curb the only unfamiliar sight was the blue " parrot-fish," 
with so striking a resemblance to the talkative bird as to be mistaken 
for it at first glance. But even here there were evidences of Grenada's 



THE CARIBBEE ISLANDS 359 

greater prosperity. White men were a trifle more numerous ; numbers 
of private automobiles climbed away into the hills by what at least 
began as excellent highways ; a telephone line on which we counted 
seventy-six wires disappeared into the interior over the first crest behind 
the town. Then a full moon came up over the fuzzy hills, lending a 
false beauty to many a commonplace old house-wall, restoring the 
romance to the heaped-up town, and flooding the world with a silver 
sheen long after we had steamed away in the direction of Trinidad. 



CHAPTER XV 

" LITTLE ENGLAND " 

THE " Ancient and Loyal Colony of Barbados " lies so far out 
to sea that it requires a real ocean voyage to reach it. Low 
and uninteresting at first glance, compared to many of the 
West Indies, it is by no means so flat as most descriptions lead one to 
suppose. Seen from the sea it stretches up to a fairly lofty central 
ridge that is regular from end to end, except for being a trifle serrated 
or ragged in the center of the island. Dutch looking windmills, the 
only survivors of the cane-crushers that have fallen into disuse and left 
only the vine-grown ruins of their stone towers in all the rest of the 
Lesser Antilles, are slowly turning here and there on the even sky-line. 
Though the island is entirely of coral and limestone formation, glaringly 
yellow-white under the blazing sunshine at close range, there is a sug- 
gestion of England in the velvety slopes of its varied-green fields as 
seen from far out in the bay. First settled by the English in 1624, 
it boasts itself the oldest British colony that has remained unceasingly 
loyal to the crown and accepts with pride the pseudonym of " Little 
England." 

Barbados has come nearer than any other land to solving the vexing 
" negro problem." Cultivated in all its extent, with a population of 
140,000 negroes and 20,000 whites on a little patch of earth twenty-one 
miles long and fifteen wide, or 1200 human beings to the square mile, 
without an acre of " bush " on which the liberated slaves could squat, 
the struggle for existence is so intense that the black man displays 
here an energy and initiative unusual to his race. The traveler hears 
rumours of the Barbadian's un-African activity long before he reaches 
the island; he sees evidences of it before his ship comes to anchor in 
Carlisle Bay. Not only is the harbor more active, more crowded with 
shipping than any other in the Lesser Antilles, but it has every air 
of a place that is " up on its toes." All the languor, the don't-care- 
whether-I-work-or-not of nature's favored spots are here replaced by a 
feverish anxiety to please, an eager energy to snap up any job that 
promises to turn a nimble shilling. Scores of rowboats surround 

360 



"LITTLE ENGLAND" 361 

the steamer in a clamoring multitude, their occupants holding aloft 
boards on which are printed the names of their craft — unromantic, 
unimaginative names compared to those of the islands that were once 
or are still French, such as "Maggie," "Bridget," " Lillie White," 
" Daisy," " Tiger." In face of the fierce competition the boatmen 
strive their utmost to win a promise from a passenger leaning over the 
rail, to impress the name of their craft on his memory so that he will 
call for it when he descends the gangway, to win his good-will by 
flattery, by some crude witticism, — " Remember the ' Maggie,' mistress ; 
Captain Snowball " ; " The ' Lillie White,' my lady ; upholstered in and 
out ! " " The ' Daisy,' my gentleman ; rowboat extraordinary to His 
Majesty ! " Meanwhile the divers for pennies, a few girls among 
them, are besieging the passengers from their curious little flat -bottomed 
boats of double wedge shape to toss their odd coins into the water 
and " see the human porpoises " display their prowess. Yet, unlike 
the pandemonium in the other islands, there is no scramble of venders 
and beggars up the gangway to the discomfiture of descending pas- 
sengers ; no crowding of boatmen about it fighting with one another 
for each possible fare, to the not infrequent disaster of the latter. A 
bull-voiced negro police sergeant, in a uniform that suggests he has 
been loaned from the cast of " Pinafore," keeps perfect order from 
the top of the gangway, permitting boats to draw near only when 
they are called by name arid ruling the clamoring situation with an 
iron hand. For there is this difference between the harbor police 
of Barbados and those of all the other ports, that they speak to be 
obeyed, permit no argument, and if they are not respected, they are 
at least duly feared. 

Bridgetown was static. The entire population was massed about the 
inner harbor; beyond the bridge that gives the town its name stood 
an immense new arch with the words " Welcome to Barbados " em- 
blazoned upon it. We thought it very kind of them to give us such 
unexpected attention, until we discovered they were not waiting for 
us at all, but for one whom some loyal but not too well schooled Bar- 
badian had named in chalk on a nearby wall the " Prints of Whales." 
This was the first time in half a century, it seems, that a member of 
the royal family to which the " ancient and loyal " little colonv has 
shown unbroken allegiance had come to visit it. The black multitude 
was agog with poorly suppressed excitement ; white natives were 
squirming nervously ; even the few Englishmen in the crowd were so 
thawed by the " epoch-making event " that they actually spoke to 



362 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

strangers. The harbor officer was so eager to lose none of it that he 
let us pass without examination; an enterprising black youth won a 
sixpence by rinding us a place on a crowded barge a few yards from 
the royal landing-stage. The tramways had been stopped ; black troops 
lined the vacant expanse of white main street that stretched away 
toward the government house. Nelson's one-armed statue in Trafal- 
gar Square had been given an oil bath ; buildings were half hidden be- 
hind the fluttering flags of all the Allies — the Stars and Stripes rarest 
among them. Even nature had contributed to the occasion by send- 
ing an unexpected little shower to lay the white limestone dust that 
habitually rouses the ire of new arrivals. The island newspaper an- 
nounced a special holiday in honor of " the Prince, who will confer 
upon the loyal inhabitants of this ancient colony the privilege of re- 
ceiving a message from his august father " ; it still carried the ad- 
vertisements of the closed shops, imploring the citizens not only to 
buy flags and decorations but to " get new clothes in honor of our 
royal visitor." 

He landed twenty minutes after us. A salvo of twenty-two guns 
from his battleship in the bay sent as many gasps of excitement and de- 
light through the eager multitude. The subconscious thought came 
to us that it might be better to pay outstanding war debts than to 
squander so much powder and coal, but it ill behooves an American 
of these days to criticize our neighbors for squandering public funds. 
Besides, it is no easy matter to keep up this loyalty-to-the-king busi- 
ness nowadays, though England, surely, need have no fear of changes. 
Then a white launch dashed up the cheering inner harbor, a curiously 
boyish-faced young man in a gleaming white helmet stepped briskly 
out on the landing-stage into a group of black policemen in speck- 
less girlish sailor suits, who seemed to lack an ostrich feather on 
their round white straw hats, the governor in full-dress uniform and 
the lord mayor in purple and red robes bowed low over the hand 
that was proffered, and the prince and his suite were whisked away. 

Black as it was, we were struck by the orderliness of the throng 
— what a pandemonium such an event would have caused in the tem- 
peramental French islands ! — and its politeness, compared to the 
other British West Indies. But if the excitement was suppressed 
with British sternness, it was not voiceless. The brief glimpse of 
the feted youth had aroused a thousand exclamations like that of 
the ragged old negro woman behind us, " Oh, my God ! Dat 's he 
himself ! Oh Christ ! " On the outskirts of the crowd another who 






" LITTLE ENGLAND " 363 

had been so iar away as to have caught, at best, a glimpse of the top 
of the royal helmet was still confiding to her surroundings, " My 
Jesus., but him good lookin' ! " An old negro in a battered derby 
through which his whitening wool peered here and there elbowed his 
way through the dispersing crowd mumbling to himself, " No use 
talkin', it's de British flag noivadays!" Farther on a breathless 
market-woman was asking with the anxious tone of a master of 
ceremonies who had missed his train and feared the worst, " Has my 
gentleman landed yet ? " But the enthusiasm was not unanimous, for 
still another woman, who fell in with us down the street, asserted, 
" Even if de prince landing, it all de same for we workin' people. 
De Prince Albert him landed fifty year ago, an' de school-girls dat 
fall wid de grandstand still hobblin' about on dey broken legs." 

The prince spent a whole day in the ancient and loyal colony be- 
fore continuing his journey to Australia, most of it in the isolation of 
the governor's residence, but if he carried away an imperfect picture 
of this isolated fragment of the empire, he could at least report to 
his " august father " that it still retains its extraordinary loyalty to 
the crown. 

Bridgetown is very English, despite its complexion and dazzling 
sunshine. Broken bottles embedded in the tops of plaster walls, which 
everywhere shut in private property, shows that this, too, is an over- 
crowded country where the few who have must take stern precau- 
tions against the many who have not. The streets bear such ultra- 
English names as " Cheapside," " Philadelphia Lane," " Literary Row," 
" Lightfoot's Passage," " Whitepark Road."" The very signboards 
carry the mind back to England — " Grog Shop — The Rose of Devon," 
" Coals for Sale," " Try Ward's Influenza Rum — Best Tonic " ; the 
tin placard of some " Assurance Company " decorates every other 
facade. Even the little shingle shacks in the far outskirts bear some un- 
romantic name painted above their doors ; shopkeepers are as insis- 
tent in giving their full qualifications as the clamoring boatmen in the 
bay. " O. B. Lawless — American Tailor — Late of Panama " an- 
nounces a tiny one-room hovel. There is a British orderliness of public 
demeanor even among the naturally disorderly negroes ; the women have 
neither the color sense nor the dignified carriage of their sisters of 
Martinique, rather the gracelessness of the English women of the 
lower classes. Yet in one thing Barbados is not English. It is 
hospitable, quite ready to enter into conversation even with strangers. 



364 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

When it is not silent and deserted under the spell of a holiday or 
its deadly Sabbath, Bridgetown pulsates with life. Its wharves are 
as busy as all those of the rest of the Lesser Antilles put together, 
as busy as our St. Thomas was before Barbados became the focal 
point of the eastern Caribbean. Bales and bundles and barrels and 
boatloads of produce pour into it as continuously as if every one of 
its 160,000 were wealthy consumers of everything the world has to 
offer. Its own product is constantly being trundled down to waiting 
lighters — great hogsheads of sugar or molasses carried on specially 
designed iron frames on wheels, each operated by three negroes who 
have not lost the amusing childishness of their race for all their com- 
petition-bred industry, for they invariably take turns in riding the 
contrivance back to the warehouse, though the clinging to it must re- 
quire far more physical exertion than walking. Steamers, schooners, 
lighters, rowboats, mule-trucks, auto-" lorries " are incessantly carry- 
ing the world's goods to and fro. Innumerable horse-carriages, scores 
of automobiles, ply for hire. Excellent electric-lights banish the dark- 
ness from all but the poorer class of houses. Yet despite the constant 
struggle for livelihood, — or perhaps because of it, — Bridgetown has 
little of the insolence of the other British West Indies. Applicants 
for odd jobs swarm and beggars are plentiful, but the latter are unof- 
fensive and the former approach each possible client with a " Do 
you want me, my gentleman ? " so courteous that one feels inclined 
to think up some imaginary errand on which to send them. They 
seem to recognize that politeness is an important asset in their con- 
stant battle against hunger, which gives them also a responsibility, a 
reliability in any task assigned them, and a moderation in their de- 
mands that is attained by few other West Indians. 

Barbados has a tramway and a railroad, the only ones between 
Porto Rico and Trinidad. True, they are modest little affairs, the 
tramcars being drawn by mules. Yet the latter step along so lively, 
the employees and most of the passengers are so courteous, and over- 
crowding is so sternly forbidden that one comes to like them, especially 
those lines which rumble along the edge of the sea in the never-fail- 
ing breeze, above all in the delightfully soft air of morning or evening. 
It would be difficult in these modern days of indifferent labor to 
find more courtesy, more earnest efficiency, and stricter living up to 
the rules than among Bridgetown's tram-drivers and conductors, yet 
their highest wage is sixty-four cents a day. But for the war, the 
system would long since have been electrified ; the new rails have al- 



" LITTLE ENGLAND " 365 

ready arrived. There is no real reason, except civic pride, however, 
that the mule-cars should be abolished. They are more reliable than 
many an electric-line in larger cities ; they are a pleasant change to 
the speed-weary traveler; and the perfection with which their extra 
mule is hitched on at the bottom of the one hill in town and un- 
hitched again at its summit without the loss of a single trot is a never- 
ending source of amusement. 

Sojourners in Barbados are certain to make the acquaintance of at 
least the long tram-line to St. Lawrence. There are plenty of hotels 
in the town proper, but they are habitually crowded with gentlemen 
of color. White visitors dwell out Hastings way, some two miles from 
Trafalgar Square. Unlike the French and Spanish towns of tropical 
America, the downtown section of the Barbadian capital is almost 
wholly given over to business — and negroes. The numerous white 
inhabitants and most of the darker ones of any standing dwell in the 
outskirts. There one may find parks shaded by mahogany and palm- 
trees, splendid avenues lined by one or both of these species, com- 
fortable residences ranging all the way from tiny " villas " draped with 
an ivy-like vine or gorgeous masses of the bougainvillea to luxurious 
estates in their own private parks. Even the poorer classes in another 
stratum still farther from the center of town dwell in neat little toy- 
houses of real comfort, compared with the huts of the masses of Haiti 
or Porto Rico. For miles along the sea beside this longest tram-line 
one passes a constant succession of comfortable, light-colored houses 
with boxed verandas, wooden shutters that raise from the bottom, and 
a sort of cap visor over the windows. In many cases these boast 
tropically unnecessary panes of glass through which one can make out 
of an evening interiors of perfect neatness, homelike, well lighted, 
furnished and decorated in taste, with none of the gaudy and crowded 
bric-a-brac to be seen behind Spanish rejas in the larger islands. 

The night life of Bridgetown is worth a ride behind the now weary 
mules, if only to see a negro urchin diligently striving to light a candle 
in a tin box on the end of his soap-box cart, lest he be hauled up for 
violation of the ordinance forbidding vehicles to circulate after dark 
without lamps. Promptly at sunset the black policemen have changed 
their white helmets and jackets for German looking caps and capes. 
i On the way downtown one passes half a dozen wide-open churches and 
chapels in which black preachers are vociferously exhorting their 
nightly congregations to " walk in de way of de Lard " ; one is cer- 
tain to rumble past the shrieking hubbub of a Salvation Army meeting 



366 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

or two. There are crowds of loafers on many a corner — jolly, in- 
offensive, black idlers with the spirit of rollicking fun in their ebony 
faces, bursting into howls of laughter at the slightest incident that 
seems comical to their primitive minds. The filthy street-habits of 
the French and Spanish islands are little in evidence, for the police 
^/ of Barbados are as vigilant as they are heavy-handed. 

Downtown the activities of the day have departed. The larger 
stores have closed at four, the small shops at sundown. Only a 
scattered score of negro women squat in Trafalgar Square before their 
little trays of peanuts, bananas, and home-made sweets, a wick torch 
burning on a corner of them whether they are deposited on the ground 
or are seeking lack of competition elsewhere on top of their owners' 
heads. There is no theater in Bridgetown; the cinema is as sad a 
parody on amusement as it is everywhere, but the audience is worth 
seeing, once. The negroes sit in the " pit," the elite, chiefly yellow of 
tint, in a kind of church gallery. Shouts, screams, roof-raising roars 
of primitive laughter, deafening applause whenever the frock-coated 
villain is undone, mark the unwinding of the film from beginning to 
end ; it is a scene far different from the comparative dignity of a 
black French audience. In the French and Spanish West Indies the 
cinemas begin after nine and end around midnight ; in Barbados they 
start sharply at seven and terminate at ten with a rush for the last 
mule-cars, with all but the swift out of luck, and Bridgetown settles 
down to deathly Sunday stillness while the weary mules are still crawl- 
ing toward the end of their laborious day. 

Or, if the visitor does not care to break up his evening by descend- 
ing into town, there are few more ideal spots in which to hear a 
band concert than the little park known as Hastings Rocks, on the 
very edge of the sea, especially under a full moon. I am an inveterate 
concert-goer; one naturally becomes so in tropical America, where 
other music is so rare, and I must confess a preference for the Spanish- 
American type of concert over the Anglo-Saxon, for the gay throngs 
of promenaders about the sometimes not too successful attempts to 
render a classical program over the staid gatherings that listen mo- 
tionless to an uproar of " popular " music. But even this serves to 
while away an evening and seldom fails to offer a touch of local color. 
Thus in negro-teeming Barbados there is scarcely a suggestion of 
African parentage to be seen at this stately entertainment on Hastings 
Rocks. It is partly the sixpence admission that keeps the negroes 
outside, but not entirely. Struck by the fact that there was only one 



" LITTLE ENGLAND " 367 

mulatto boy and two light-yellow girls, all very staid and quiet, on the 
seaside benches, I sought information of the negro gate-keeper. Yes, 
indeed, he refused admittance to most of those of his own color, and 
to some white people, too. 

" You see," he explained, " it is like this. Perhaps last night you 
might go with a girl downtown, and then you come here to-night with 
your wife; and if that girl allowed to come in here she might want to 
get familiar and gossip with you. Or she might giggle at you. We 
can't have that" he added, in a tone that reminded one that the Briton, 
even when his skin is black, is first cousin to Mrs. Grundy. The Eng- 
lish sense of dignified orderliness and the negro's natural gaiety, his 
tendency to " giggle " at inopportune moments, do not mix well, and 
the Hasting Rocks concert is one of those places where African hilarity 
must be ruthlessly suppressed. 

Besides Bridgetown, with its 35,000 or more inhabitants, Barbados 
has a number of what might best be called large collections of houses, 
such as Speightstown, Holetown — popularly known as " the Hole " — 
and the like, but its population, surpassed in density, if at all, only by 
China, a density compared to which that of Porto Rico seems slight 
indeed, is spread so evenly over all the island that it is hard to tell 
where a town begins or ends. The island is one of the most remarkable 
instances of coral formation. Comparatively flat, when likened to 
most of the West Indies, it consists of a number of stages or platforms 
that have been built one after the other as the island rose slowly 
and gradually from the sea to a height, at one point, of nearly 1200 
feet. When first discovered it was surrounded by mangrove swamps 
and tangled, rotting vegetation, but all this has since turned to solid 
ground. The coral of which it is built contains some ninety per cent, 
of lime, so that almost the whole island might be reduced to powder 
in a lime-kiln. The rest of it consists of a species of sandstone known 
as " Scotland rock," which comes to the surface in the northwestern 
part of the island. 

Thanks to its geological formation, the close network of roads which 
reaches every corner of Barbados, as well -as all its bare open spaces, 
are glaringly white and hard on the eyes, especially, if one may judge 
by the prevalence of glasses among them, those of the white and 
V high yellow " inhabitants. Yet, for the same reason, it is perhaps 
the most healthful of the West Indies. It has no swamps to breed 
malaria ; the trade winds from the open ocean sweep incessantly across 



368 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

it. Once it was troubled with typhoid, but the establishment of a 
single unpolluted water supply for the whole island has done away 
with this danger. There is great equability of temperature day or 
night the year round. The wet season, from June to October, is less 
so than in most tropical lands ; though visitors and European inhabitants 
complain of the midday heat, except in December and January, it is 
always cool compared to midsummer in the United States. Fresh, dry, 
and constantly laden with ocean ozone, it is a climate that makes little 
demand upon the strength and vital powers. All indications point to 
the fact, however, that it is no place for white women as permanent 
residents, for virtually without exception they grow scrawny, nervous, 
and weak-eyed, their pasty complexions sprayed with f.reckles under 
their veils. 

All roads lead to Bridgetown, but to follow them in the opposite 
direction to any chosen point is not so simple a matter. Signboards 
are almost unknown, no doubt being considered a superfluity in so 
small and crowded a community. The country people, though will- 
ing enough, are often too stupid to give intelligible directions, though 
they make up for this by a persistency in showing one the way in per- 
son which no amount of protest can overcome. Ask a question or give 
them any other slightest excuse to do so, and they will cling to the 
white pedestrian's heels for miles in the hope of picking up a penny or 
a " bit," always taking their leave with, " I beg you for a cent, -sir." 
Indeed, that is the constant refrain everywhere along the dazzling but 
excellent highways. Women and men shout it from the doors of 
their little cabins ; children scamper after one, the black babies are 
egged on by their elders as soon as they can toddle, each shrieking the 
invariable demand in a tone of voice which suggests that refusal is 
impossible. They seem to fancy that white strangers cross the island 
for no other purpose than to distribute a cartload of English coppers 
along the way. Almost as incessant are the demands upon the kodak- 
carrier to " Make me photo, sir," or, " Draw me portrait, master." 

On week-days the highways of Barbados are as crowded as city 
streets. Heavy draft horses and mules, auto-trucks large and small, 
are constantly descending to Bridgetown with the cumbersome hogs- 
heads of sugar and molasses, or returning with supplies for the 
estates. There is an endless procession of almost toy-like carts, each 
drawn by a single small donkey, the two wheels habitually wobbly, 
the name, address, and license number of the owner in crude letters 
on the front of the diminutive box. The donkey is the invariable beast 




The Prince of Wales lands in Barbados 




The principal street of Bridgetown, decorated in honor of its royal visitor 




Barbadian porters loading hogsheads of sugar always take turns riding back to 

the warehouse 




There is an Anglican Church of this style in each of the eleven parishes of Barbados 



" LITTLE ENGLAND " 369 

of burden of the Barbadian of the masses. He carries to town the 
products of little gardens ; he brings the supplies of the innumerable 
small shops throughout the island ; the country youth takes his " girl " 
riding in his donkey-cart ; in later years the whole ebony family packs 
into it for a jolt across the country. Unlike the rest of tropical Amer- 
ica, Barbados does not ride its donkeys or use them as pack-animals ; 
nor, to all appearances, are they abused. Centuries of British training 
seems to have given the black islanders a compassion rare among 
their neighbors. Horesmen and pack-mules are likewise unknown 
along the white highways ; oxen are rare ; pedestrians are much less 
numerous than one would expect in so populous a community, while 
bicycles are as widely in use as in England. 

There is a curiously English homelikeness about the landscape, 
which, if it is seldom rugged, is by no means monotonous. Every 
acre of ground is utilized ; forbidding stone-and-mud walls topped by 
spikes or broken glass line the roads for long distances ; villages, or at 
least houses, are so continuous that one is almost never out of human 
sight or sound. Coral is so abundant and wood so expensive that 
immense limestone steps often lead up to tiny wooden shacks, as out 
of proportion to their foundations as statues to their pedestals. The 
majority of the rather well-kept little negro cabins, however, are 
simply set up on small blocks of coral at the four corners. More than 
one band of hilarious sailors from visiting battleships have amused 
themselves by removing one of these props and tumbling a Barbadian 
family out of their beds in the small hours of the night. 

Shopkeeping might almost be called the favorite sport of the " Bade- 
yan"; the lack of jobs enough to go round has led so many to adopt 
this means of winning a possible livelihood that the island has been 
called " Over-shopped Barbados." Everywhere wayside shanties bear 
the familiar black sign with white letters, varying only in name and 
number: " Percival Brathwaite — Licensed Seller of Liquors — No. 
765." Inside, perhaps behind a counter contrived from a single 
precious board, are a few crude shelves stocked mainly with bottles 
of rum or with cheap " soft drinks," a few shillings' worth of uninvit- 
ing foodstuffs flanking them. The Barbadians have long been known 
as the "Yankees of the West Indies." They are far more diligent 
merchants than most natives of tropical America, so much so that 
neither the Chinese, Jews, Portuguese, nor Syrians, so numerous in 
the other islands, can compete with them to advantage. But their 
knowledge of book-keeping is scanty, and it is often only the visible 



370 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

end of his light resources that convinces the petty shopkeeper that he 
is losing, rather than gaining at the popular pastime. 

Every little way along the island roads other shanties bear the sign 
of this or that " Friendly Society." These are a species of local in- 
surance company or mutual benefit association. The negroes pay into 
them from three pence to a shilling a week, — some of the poorer 
neighbors nothing at all, — and receive in return sickness or accident 
benefits, or have their funeral expenses paid in case of death. But 
they are typically tropical or African in their indifference to a more 
distant to-morrow, for at the end of each year the remaining funds are 
divided among those members who have not drawn out more than they 
paid in, and with perhaps as much as five dollars each in their pockets 
the society indulges in a hilarious " blow-out." Equally numerous are 
the signboards of " agents " of the undertakers of Bridgetown. They 
do not believe in waiting for the sickle of Father Time, those death- 
bed functionaries of the capital, but drum up trade with Barbadian 
energy. The island's newspaper habitually carries their enticing pleas 
for clients: 

" OUR DEAD MUST BE BURIED," begins one of these appeals. 
" In the SAD HOUR why trouble yourself over the Dead when you 
can see E. T. ARCHER GITTENS, the up-to-date and experienced 
UNDERTAKER face to face? Look for the Hearse with the 
GOLDEN ANGEL!" There follows a "poem" of twenty-four 
verses setting forth the advantages of being buried by Gittens and 
ending with the touching appeal: 

Just take a ride to Tweedside Stable 
And you '11 see that this is no Fable. 
Phone 281 night or day 
And you '11 hear what Gittens has to say. 
He and his staff are always on hand 
To accommodate any class of man. 
"All orders will be promptly executed at MODERATE PRICES. 
A TRIAL WILL CONVINCE." 

No doubt it would. 

The Barbados government railway — one could not call it a rail- 
road in so English a community — is an amusing little thing twenty 
years old and some two hours long, though that does not mean as much 
in miles as one might expect. On week-days its passenger-train some- 
times makes a one-way journey, at a cost of four shillings and six- 



" LITTLE ENGLAND " 371 

pence for first and two shillings for second-class travelers, but on Sun- 
days it indulges in the whole round trip. From the station near the 
famous bridge from which the capital takes its name, the little train 
tears away as if excited at its own importance, through slightly roll- 
ing cane-fields, rocky white coral gullies, past frequent Dutchy wind- 
mills flailing their shadows on the ground. Vistas as broad as if it 
were crossing a continent instead of a tiny parcel of land flung far 
out into the ocean, spread on either hand, that to the right flat and 
almost desertlike in its aridity, the north broken in rugged low ridges, 
with many scattered villages and gray heaps of sugar-mills on their 
crests. The soil is so thin one marvels that it will grow anything, 
yet every acre of it shows signs of constant cultivation, the long ex- 
panses of cane broken here and there by small patches of corn, cas- 
sava, yams, and the sweet potatoes on which the mass of the popula- 
tion depends for nourishment. Every few minutes the train halts 
at a station seething with cheerful black faces; everywhere it crosses 
white coral roads, some of them* cut deep down through the lime- 
stone ridges. Trees are almost plentiful, but they all show evidence 
of having been planted. The Spanish discoverers, it is said, gave the 
island its present name because its forests were bearded (barbudos) 
with what is known in our southern states as " Spanish moss," but 
this, like the original woods, has long since disappeared. 

Sunday is as dead as it can only be in a British community. The 
cattle and mules stand in the corrals eating dry cane-tops ; the square 
brick chimneys of the boiling-houses emit not a fleck of smoke. Only 
in rare cases even are the windmills allowed to work, though for some 
reason nature does not shut off the bracing trade-wind. This is so 
constant that it forces all the branches of the trees to the southwest, 
until even the royal palms seem to be wearing their hair on one side. 
Fields brown with cut cane-tops contrast with the pale green of those 
still unharvested ; the general sun-flooded whiteness of the landscape 
is painful to the eyes. Here and there is a patch of blackish soil, but 
it has the vigorless air of having long been overworked, a looseness 
as of volcanic lava. 

In less than an hour the Atlantic spreads out on the horizon ahead. 
Rusty limestone cliffs, a jagged coral coast against which the sea dashes 
itself as if angry at the first resistance it encounters since passing the 
Cape Verde Islands many hundred miles away, stretch out to the 
north and south. We come out to the edge of it, fifty feet above, 
then descend to a track so close to the surf that the right of way must 



372 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

be braced up with old rails. It is a dreary, barren-dry, brown-yellow 
coast, yet of a beauty all its own, with its chaotic jumble of huge rocks 
among which hundreds of negroes are bathing stark naked and spout- 
ing holes out of which the thundering surf dashes high into the air. 
Farther north the landscape grows almost mountainous, but we have 
already reached Bathsheba, where Sunday travelers habitually dis- 
embark, leaving the train to crawl on alone to a few tiny oil-wells 
around the next rugged promontory. 

I climbed the sheer cliff a thousand feet high above Bathsheba, 
its face covered with brown grasses, ferns, creeping plants, and the 
smaller species of palm that cling to each projecting rock as if their 
available nourishment were as scanty and precious as that of the 
teeming human population. The view from the summit forever ban- 
ishes the notion that Barbados is flat. All " Scotland," as the northern 
end of the island is called, is laid out before you, broken and pitched 
and jumbled until it resembles the Andes in miniature. White rib- 
bons of roads and a network of trails are carelessly strewn away 
across it, hundreds of huts are scattered over its chaotic surface, and 
an immense building stands forth on the summit of its highest hill. 
Jagged, gray-black sandstone boulders of gigantic size contrast with 
the white limestone to give the tumbled scene the aspect of having 
been left unfinished by the Builder of the western hemisphere in his 
hurry to cross the Atlantic. Below, this scene spreads away to in- 
finity, its scalloped, foam-lashed shore clear-cut in the dry, luminous 
atmosphere as far as the eye can see in either direction. Behind, the 
picture is tamer, though by no means level. Rolling cane-fields, with 
here and there a royal palm, numerous clusters of huts, and the ubi- 
quitous chimneys and windmills of sugar-factories breaking the sky- 
line, stretch endlessly away to the yellow-brown horizon. 

I returned to Bridgetown on foot — he who still fancies the island 
is level and tiny should walk across it on a blazing Sunday afternoon 
— passing not more than a score of travelers on the way. Once I 
paused to chat with a group of " poor whites," as they call themselves,' 
or what their black neighbors refer to as " poor buckras " or " red 
legs." These reminders of our own " crackers " are numerous in 
Barbados, especially in the " Scotland " district. They are descendants 
of the convicts or prisoners taken in the civil wars of England during 
the Commonwealth or the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion. Chiefly 
Scotch and Irish, some of them royalists of the nobility, they were 
sent to the island by Cromwell between 1650 and 1660 and sold to the 



" LITTLE ENGLAND " 373 

planters for 1500 pounds of sugar a head. It is doubtful whether 
any of them would be worth that now. Branded and mutilated to pre- 
vent their escape, treated more brutally than the blacks by whom they 
are held in contempt to this day, they steadily declined in health and 
spirits until their present descendants, with the exception of the few 
who rose to be planters, are listless and poverty-stricken, degenerate 
victims of the hookworm and of intermarriage. The original pris- 
oners wore kilts ; hence the tropical sun soon won them the nickname 
of " red legs," which has persisted to this day, perhaps because their 
bare feet have still a distinctly ruddy tinge. But their faces are corpse- 
like in color and their bodies thin and anemic. Of the adults in this 
group, not one had more than a half dozen crumbling fangs in the 
way of teeth. 

Yet they seemed moderately well-informed and of far quicker in- 
telligence than the sturdier blacks who so despise them. Their air 
of honest simplicity acquitted them of any suggestion of boasting 
when they asserted that the *' poor whites " never steal cane and other 
growing crops, the theft of which by the negroes, despite heavy penal- 
ties, is one of the curses of the island. The chief topic of conversa- 
tion, nevertheless, was that inevitable post-war one the world over, the 
high cost of food. Coffee, their principal nourishment, they took 
nowadays without sugar, and though it had sold at sixteen cents a 
pound when the war ended, it was now forty. Rice, sweet potatoes, 
meal, even breadfruit, " the staff of Barbados," had trebled in price. 
Their " spots," as they call their gardens, were constantly being robbed 
by the negroes. It was no use trying to keep a goat or a sheep ; some 
black thief was sure to carry it off. 

I succeeded at length in bringing up the matter of education. They 
sent their boys to the public schools, but it was not safe to send the 
girls. There were elementary schools in every parish, where each 
pupil paid a penny a week. The teachers were nearly all men and all 
were colored. In the higher public schools, which an average tuition 
of $72 a year put out of reach for most of them, the teachers were 
usually Englishmen ; but the color-line was drawn only in the private 
schools, of which there were plenty for those who could afford them. 
While they talked I noted that the enmity between the two races was 
camouflaged under an outward friendliness ; the greetings between the 
group of " red legs " and the black passers-by had a heartiness of tone 
that might easily have deceived an unenquiring observer. 

One of the sights of Barbados is the large, old, gray stone Anglican 



374 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

church in each of the eleven parishes. Their erection was decreed 
way back in the days when the Earl of Carlisle, having a superior 
" pull " with the King of England, ousted Sir William Courteen as 
founder of the colony. They are as English in their sturdy bulkiness, 
with their heavy crenelated stone towers and the replica of an English 
country churchyard about each of them, despite the difficulty of digging 
graves in hard limestone, as the English sparrows which flock about 
the neighboring cane-fields. The Anglicans, having gotten in on the 
ground floor, have almost a monopoly in the island, though other de- 
nominations have no great difficulty in establishing their claims to en- 
dowments. The Catholics, of whom there are barely a thousand, have 
only one small church. Even the shouting sects seem to have less 
popularity among the Barbadians than in most negro communities. 
Religion is reputed the true bulwark of the social order in Barbados, 
but it is rather because the long established churches serve to main- 
tain the class distinctions on which this is based than because they 
succeed in holding the negroes up to any particularly high standard 
of morals. Mrs. Grundy is strongly entrenched in all the British West 
Indies, but her influence is rather superficial among the black masses, 
who have a considerable amount of what other races call the " hypo- 
crisy " of the Anglo-Saxon. 

But Sunday is no time to see Barbados. I walked entirely across the 
island without meeting one donkey-cart, so numerous on week-days. 
There was scarcely a wheeled vehicle in all the long white vista of 
highways, except a rare bicycle and the occasional automobile of a 
party of American tourists. Pedestrians were as rare; the people 
were everywhere shut in behind their tight-closed wooden shutters, a 
few of them singing hymns, most of them sleeping in their air-tight 
cabins. The few I roused, out of mere curiosity, treated the annoy- 
ance as something bordering on the sacrilegious. Nowhere was there 
a group under the trees ; never a picnic party ; not a sign of any one 
enjoying life. Bridgetown itself, compared to the swarming uproar 
of the " prince's day," was as a graveyard to carnival time. 

With the dawn of Monday, however, the island awakens again to 
its feverish activity, and one may easily catch an auto-truck across the 
floor-flat, dusty plain stretching some five miles inland from the capital 
and drop off on the breezy higher shelves of the island. Something 
of interest is sure to turn up within the next mile or two. 

The Barbadian, for instance, digs his wells not to get water, but to 



" LITTLE ENGLAND " 375 

get rid of it. They are to be found everywhere, often at the very 
edge of the highway and always open and unprotected. They are big 
round holes cut far down into the jagged coral rock, splendid places, 
it would seem, into which to throw something or somebody for which 
one has no use. This is exactly their purpose, for they are designed 
to carry off the floods of the rainy season. Barbados has no rivers 
and no lakes, or rather, these are all underground, some of them in 
immense caverns. In former, days the mass of the population de- 
pended for its water supply on shallow, intermittent ponds, the better 
class on private arrangements. Now two central pumping stations 
and more than a hundred miles of underground pipe furnish the entire 
island with excellent, if luke-warm, water from the unseen rivers. 
Instead of the roadside shrines of the French islands, the limestone 
embankments of Barbadian highways have faucets at frequent in- 
tervals. Water is free to those who fetch it from these. The better 
class residents are everywhere supplied by private pipes at a nominal 
sum per house. Business places pay thirty cents per thousand gal- 
lons, which is considered so expensive that only one estate on the 
island is irrigated though drought is frequently disastrous in the west 
and south. 

The stodgy windmills everywhere fanning the air are used exclu- 
sively for the grinding of cane. It is a rare patch of landscape that 
does not show at least half a dozen of these toiling away six days of 
the week. The fact that they have survived in Barbados, of all the 
West Indies, may be as much due to its unfailing trade wind as to the 
crowded conditions which make the innovation of labor-saving devices 
so unpopular. Methods long since abandoned elsewhere are still in 
vogue in Barbadian sugar-mills. The cane is passed by hand between 
the iron rollers in the stone windmill tower. The big hilltop yard about 
this is covered with drying bagasse, or cane pulp, which is finally 
heaped up about the boiling-house in which it serves as fuel. The 
juice runs in open troughs from the windmill to this latter building, 
where it is strained and left to settle until the scum rises to the surface. 
Then, this being skimmed off, it is boiled in open copper kettles. A 
negro watches each of them, dipping out the froth now and then 
with a huge soup-ladle and tossing the boiling liquid into the air when 
it shows signs of burning. Toward the end of the process the 
" sugar-master " is constantly trying the syrup between a finger and 
thumb, in order to tell when the crystals are forming and when to 
" strike " the contents of the kettle, which must be done at the right 



376 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

moment if the sugar is to be worth shipping. From beginning to 
end the work is done by hand, and a Barbadian sugar-mill has little 
resemblance, except in its pungently sweet odor, to the immense centrals 
of Cuba. 

In the early days the sugarmen had much trouble in transporting 
their product because of the deep gullies and bad roads. Once upon 
a time camels were used, but though they answered the purpose 
splendidly, being very sure-footed and capable of carrying the price 
of a " red leg " each, they died for lack of a proper diet. To this day 
Barbadian sugar or molasses is shipped in the cumbersome no-gallon 
hogsheads which were adopted in the days of camels, though the haul- 
ing is now done on mule or auto-trucks. 

With an unlimited supply of cheap labor, it is natural that the Bar- 
badian planters should cling to the old processes. Indeed, the estate 
owner who attempts to bring in new machinery is heartily criticized 
by his competitors, while the establishment of new mills is out of the 
question, there being already too many factories for the available acre- 
age. The sugar planters, nine out of ten of whom are as white as the 
Anglo-Saxon can be after many generations of tropical residence, hold 
all Barados, leaving only the steeper hillsides and the less fertile patches 
as " spots " on which the " red legs " and the negroes plant their 
yams, arrowroot, sweet potatoes, and cassava. They live in luxurious 
old manor houses, usually on high knolls overlooking their not par- 
ticularly broad acres, half-hidden in groves of mahogany-trees, which 
are protected by law from destruction. With few exceptions they 
are the descendants of English colonists, and still keep the British 
qualities their ancestors brought with them, keep them so tenaciously 
that in some ways they are more English than the modern Englishman 
himself. There are suggestions that they are as short-sighted as most 
conservatives in taking the last ounce of advantage of the crowded 
conditions to keep the laboring masses at ludicrously low wages. 
Molasses, which the Barbadians call " syrup," has advanced from seven 
cents to a dollar a gallon in the past few years, yet the planters are still 
paying about a shilling per hundred " holes " of cane, making it im- 
possible for the hardest workers to earn more than "two and six " 
a day, though the prices, even of the foodstuffs grown on the island, 
have nearly all trebled. The pessimists foresee trouble and cite the 
continual presence of a battleship in Barbadian waters as proof that 
even the government fears it. But though they constitute only one 
eighth of the population and the percentage is steadily decreasing, 



" LITTLE ENGLAND " 377 

the whites have always ruled in Barbados. As early as 1649 tne 
slaves planned to kill them all off, and kept the secret of the conspiracy 
so well that it would probably have succeeded but for a servant who 
gave the planters warning on the eve of the attack. In 1816 there 
came another fierce negro rebellion, which was put down with an iron 
hand. Since then the blacks have been given little real voice in the 
government, despite their overwhelming majority, and the traveler 
of to-day finds Barbados the one island of the British West Indies in 
which the negroes are not beginning to " feel their oats." 

Some attribute the patent difference between the Barbadian and 
other negroes of the western hemisphere to his origin in Sierra Leone, 
while the rest came from the Kru or the Slave Coast, but there is little 
historical evidence to support this contention. Still others credit his 
superior energy and initiative to the absence of malaria in the island. 
Most observers see in those qualities merely a proof that the negro 
develops most nearly into a creditable member of society under phys- 
ical conditions which require him either to work or starve. Whoever 
is right, the fact remains that Barbados is one of the few places where 
emancipation was not disastrous, and that the Barbadians are probably, 
on the whole, the most pleasant mannered people in the West Indies, 
if not in the western hemisphere. Except for rare cases of rowdy- 
ism, they are always courteous, yet without cringing. Even those in 
positions bringing them into official contact with the public are, as is 
too often the reverse in many another country, extremely obliging, 
cheerful, yet never patronizing, rarely brusk, yet efficient and prompt, 
fairly true to their promises, for a tropical country, and have little 
of that aggressive insolence which is becoming so wide-spread among 
the negroes in our own country and the other British West Indies. 
The crowded condition of the country evidently makes the constant 
meeting of people a reason to cut down friction to the minimum, while 
the necessity of earning a livelihood where work is scarce leads them 
to be careful not to antagonize any one. 

That they are amusing goes without saying. The magnificent black 
" bobby " in his white blouse and helmet, for instance, does not reply 
to your query about the next tramway with, " Goin' to Hastings? 
Better geta move on then," but with a mellifluous, " Ah, your destina- 
tion is Hastings? Then you will be obliged to proceed very rapidly; 
otherwise you are in danger of being detained a half-hour until the 
next car departs." Yet they are not a people that grows upon one. 
As with all negroes, there is a shallowness back of their politeness, a 



378 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

something which reminds you every now and then that they have no 
history, no traditions, no ancient culture — such as that which is ap- 
parent, for instance, in the most ragged Hindu coolie — behind them. 
Small as it is, there are many more points of interest in Barbados. 
There is Speightstown, for example, where whaling is still sometimes 
carried on ; Holetown, with its monument to the first English colonists ; 
a marvelous view of all the ragged Atlantic coast from the parish 
churchyard of St. John's, in which lies buried a descendant of the 
Greek emperors who was long its sexton; Mt. Hillaby, the highest 
point of the island, from which one may look down upon all the chaotic 
jumble of hills in St. Andrew's Parish, better known as " Scotland," 
or in the south the broad, parched flatlands of Christ Church, the only 
one of the eleven parishes not named for some saint of the Anglican 
calendar. Or there is amusement, at least, among the huts tucked away 
into every jagged coral ravine, in noting the curious subterfuges adopted 
to wrest a livelihood from an overburdened and rather unwilling soil. 
Every acre of the island being under cultivation, there is, of course, 
no hunting; wild animals are unknown, except for a few monkeys in 
Turner's Woods. These are rarely seen, for so human have they be- 
come in their own struggle for existence that they post a guard when- 
ever they engage in their forays and flee at his first intimation of 
danger. Negro boys earn a penny or two a day for keeping the 
monkeys off the cane-fields. There being no streams or lakes, the 
island has no disciples of Isaac Walton, but the Barbadians are in- 
veterate fishermen, for all that. Time was when the little boats which 
are constantly pushing out to sea in water so clear that one may see 
every crevice of the coral bottom sixty feet below brought back more 
fish than the island could consume. Then one might buy a hundred 
flying-fish for a penny ; to-day these favorites of the Barbadian table 
cost as high as two pence each, while the equally familiar dolphins 
cost twice that a pound. " Sea eggs," which are nothing more or less 
than the sea-urchin of northern waters, are a standard dish in this 
crowded community, for the same reason, perhaps, that the French 
have discovered the edible qualities of snails. 

Barbados is the only foreign land ever visited by the father of our 
country. In the winter of 1751-52, nearly a quarter of a century be- 
fore the Revolution, Captain George Washington, then adjutant gen- 
eral of Virginia at one hundred and fifty pounds a year, accompanied 
his brother on a journey in quest of his health. Major Lawrence 



" LITTLE ENGLAND » 3^9 

Washington of the British army, owner of Mt. Vernon, fourteen years 
older than George, had been suffering from consumption since he 
served in the expedition against Cartagena in South America. They 
sailed direct to Barbados, then a famous health resort, by schooner. 
The skipper must have been weak on navigation, for, says George's 
journal, '* We were awakened one morning by a cry of land, when by 
our reckonings there should have been none within 150 leagues of us. 
If we had been a bit to one side or the other we would never have 

noticed the island and would have run on down to " the future 

father of our country does not seem to have a very clear idea just where. 
In fact, school-marms who have been holding up the hatchet-wielder 
as a model for their pupils — unless some millionaire movie hero has 
taken his place in the hearts of our young countrymen nowadays — 
will no doubt be horrified to learn that George was not only weak in 
geography, but even in spelling. He frequently speaks of " fields of 
cain," for instance, and sometimes calls his distressing means of con- 
veyance a " scooner," or a " chooner." But let him speak for himself : 

Nov. 4, 1751 — This morning received a card from Major Clark welcoming us 
to Barbadoes, with an invitation to breakfast and dine with him. We went — 
myself with some reluctance, as the small pox was in the family. Mrs. Clark 
was so much indisposed [the italics are mine] by it that we had not the pleasure 
of her company. Spent next few days writ g letters to be carried by the Chooner 
Fredericksburg to Virginia. 

Thursday 8th. Came Capt n Crofton with his proposals which tho extrava- 
gantly dear my Brother was obliged to give. £15 pr Month is his charge exclu- 
sive of Liquors & washings which we find. In the evening we remov'd some of 
our things up and ourselves ; it 's pleasantly situated pretty near the sea and ab* 
a mile from the Town, the prospective agreable by Land and pleasant by Sea 
as we command the prospect of Carlyle Bay & all the shipping in such a manner 
that none can go in or out with out being open to our view. 

The Washingtons evidently lived near the same spot now inhabited 
by American tourists, any two of whom would be only too happy nowa- 
days to pay forty-three dollars a month for board and lodging, 
" Liquor " or no liquor. Capt. Crofton, the rascally profiteer, must 
have made a small fortune out of his " paying guests,", for they were 
always being invited out to meals at the " Beefstake & Tripe Club " 
or elsewhere. Church members, however, will be glad to see the next 
entry, despite of that unhappy break about the '* Liquor " : 

Sunday nth. Dressed in order for Church but got to Town too Late. [What 
man ever kept his sense of time in the tropics?] Went to Evening Service. 



380 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Thursday 15th. Was treated with a play ticket to see the Tragedy of George 
Barnwell acted. [George, you see, was no money-strewing tourist. But then, 
he was not an American in those days.] 

Saturday 17th. Was strongly attacked with the small Pox sent for Dr. Lana- 
han whose attendance was very constant till my recovery and going out which 
was not 'till thursday the 12th December. 

December 12th. Went to Town visited Maj. Clarke (who kindly visited me 
in my illness and contributed all he cou'd in send'g me the necessary's required 
by ye disorder). 

Kind of him, surely, after his other little contribution to " ye dis- 
order " in the shape of that first invitation. The only real result of the 
Washingtons' trip to Barbados was that our first President was pock- 
marked for life, for Lawrence got no good out of the trip. George 
went back to Virginia and Lawrence to Bermuda, where he grew 
steadily worse, and finally went home to die at Mt. Vernon the follow- 
ing summer bequeathing the estate to his younger brother. 

Washington speaks constantly in his journal of the hospitality of 
Barbados. That characteristic remains to this day, where it is car- 
ried to an extreme unknown in England and rarely in the United 
States. Of all the Lesser Antilles, one leaves Barbados, perhaps, 
with most regret. 



CHAPTER XVI 

TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 

AS his steamer drops anchor far out in the immense shallow 
of the Gulf of Paria, the traveler cannot but realize that at 
last he has come to the end of the West Indies and is en- 
croaching upon the South American continent. The " Trinity " of 
fuzzy hills, to-day called the " Three Sisters," for which Columbus 
named the island have quite another aspect than the precipitous vol- 
canic peaks of the Lesser Antilles. Plump, placid, their vegetation 
tanned a light brown by the now truly tropical sun, they have a strong 
family resemblance to the mountains of Venezuela hazily looming into 
the sky back across the Bocas. Fog, unknown among the stepping- 
stones to the north, hangs like wet wool over all the lowlands, along 
the edge of the bay. The trade wind that has never failed on the long 
journey south has given place to an enervating breathlessness ; by seven 
in the morning the sun is already cruelly beating down; instead of the 
clear blue waters of the Caribbean, the vast expanse of harbor has 
the drab, lifeless color of a faded brown carpet. Sail-boats, their 
sails limply aslack as they await the signal to come and carry off the 
steamer's cargo, give the scene a half-Oriental aspect that recalls 
the southern coast of China. 

There is little, indeed, to excite the senses as the crowded launch 
plows for half an hour toward the uninviting shore. Seen from the 
harbor, Port of Spain, with its long straight line of wharves and ware- 
houses, looks dismal in the extreme, especially to those who have left 
beautiful St. Georges of Grenada the evening before. Yet from the 
moment of landing one has the feeling of having gotten somewhere 
at last. The second in size and the most prosperous of the British 
West Indies may be less beautiful than the scattered toy-lands border- 
ing the Caribbean, but a glance suffices to prove it far more progres- 
sive. Deceived by its featureless appearance from the sea, the traveler 
is little short of astounded to find Port of Spain an extensive city, 
the first real city south of Porto Rico, with a beauty of its own un- 
suggested from the harbor. Spread over an immense plain sloping 

381 



382 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ever so slightly toward the sea, with wide, right-angled, perfect asphalt 
streets, electric-cars as up-to-date as those of any American city cover- 
ing it in every direction, and having most of the conveniences of 
modern times, it bears little resemblance to the backward, if more 
picturesque, " capitals " of the string of tiny islands to the north. The 
insignificant " Puerto de los Espanoles," which the English found here 
when they captured the island a mere century and a quarter ago, was 
burned to the ground in 1808; another conflagration swept it in 1895, 
so that the city of to-day has a sprightly, new-built aspect, despite 
the comparative flimsiness of its mainly wooden buildings. There 
are numerous imposing structures of brick and stone, too, along its 
broad streets, and many splendid residences in the suburbs stretching 
from the bright and ample business section to the foot of the encircling 
hills. 

Long before he reaches these, however, the visitor is sure to be 
struck by the astonishing variety of types that make up the population. 
Unlike that of the smaller islands, the development of Trinidad came 
mainly after African slavery was beginning to be frowned upon, and 
though the negro element of its population is large, the monotony of 
flat noses and black skins is broken by an equal number of other 
racial characteristics. Large numbers of Chinese workmen were im- 
ported in the middle of the last century; Hindu coolies, indentured 
for five years, were introduced in 1839, and though the Government 
of India has recently forbidden this species of servitude, fully one 
third of the inhabitants are East Indians or their more or less full- 
blooded descendants. Toward the end of the eighteenth century large 
numbers of French refugees took up their residence in Trinidad, and 
the island to-day has more inhabitants of this race than any of the 
West Indies not under French rule. Many of the plantation-owners 
are of this stock, improvident fellows, if one may believe the rumors 
afloat, who mortgage their estates when times are hard. Then, instead 
of paying their debts when the price of sugar and cacao make them 
temporarily rich, they go to Europe " on a tear." Martinique and 
Guadeloupe have also sent their share of laborers, and there are sec- 
tions of Trinidad in which the negroes are as apt to speak French as 
English. Portuguese, fleeing persecution in Madeira, added to this 
heterogeneous throng, while Venezuelans are constantly drifting across 
the Bocas to increase the helter-skelter of races that makes up the 
island's present population. 

All this mixture may be seen in a single block of Port of Spain. 






TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 383 

Here the stroller passes a wide-open, unfurnished room where tur- 
banned Hindus squat on their heels on the bare floor, some with long 
shovel-beards through which they run their thin, oily fingers, some in 
the act of getting their peculiar hair-cuts, nearly all of them smoking 
their curious tree-shaped pipes, all of them chattering their dialects 
in the rather effeminate voices of their race. On the sidewalk outside 
are their women, in gold nose-rings varying in size from mere buttons 
to hoops which flap against a cheek as they walk, silver bracelets from 
wrists to elbows, anklets clinking above their bare feet, the lobes of 
their ears loaded down with several chain-links, as well as earrings, 
their bare upper arms protruding from the colorful cheap shrouds in 
which they wrap themselves, a corner of it thrown over their bare 
heads. There are wide diversities of type, even of this one race. Here 
a group of Madrassis, several degrees blacker than the others, is 
stretched out on another unswept floor, there a Bengalee squats in a 
doorway arranging his straight black hair with a wooden comb. Mo- 
hammedans and Brahmins, sworn enemies throughout the island as at 
home, pass each other without a sign of recognition. Men of different 
castes mingle but slightly, despite the broadening influence of foreign 
travel ; they have one and all lost caste by crossing the sea, but all in 
equal proportion, so that their relative standing remains the same. The 
influence of their new environment has affected them in varying degrees. 
Two men alike enough in features to be brothers, the one in an elaborate 
turban, loose silky blouse, and a flowing white mass of cloth hitched 
together between his legs in lieu of trousers, the other in a khaki suit 
and a Wild West felt hat, stand talking together in Hindustanee. 
Women in nose-rings, bracelets, and massive silver necklaces weighing 
several pounds are sometimes garbed in hat, shirt-waist, and skirt, some- 
times even in low shoes with silver anklets above them. 

Next door to these groups, or alternating between them, is a family 
of the same slovenly, thick-tongued, jolly negroes who overrun all the 
West Indies. The difference in color between these and the Hindus, 
even the swarthy Madrassis, is striking; the one is done in charcoal, 
the other in oil colors. As great is the contrast between the coarse 
features of the Africans and those of the East Indians, so finely modeled 
that they might be taken for Caucasians, except for their mahogany 
complexions. Even in manners the two races are widely separated. 
While the negro is forward, fawningly aggressive, occasionally insolent, 
the Hindus have a detached air which causes them never to intrude 
upon the passer-by, even to the extent of a glance. They might be 



384 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

blind in so far as any evidence of attention to the other races about 
them goes. Abutting the negro residence is perhaps a two-story house 
with a long perpendicular signboard in Chinese characters, a shop below, 
a residence above, with many curious Celestial touches. Then comes 
a building placarded in Spanish, " Venezuelans very welcome," where 
not a word of English is spoken by the whole swarming family. On 
down the street stretch all manner of queer mixtures of customs, cos- 
tumes, races, language, rnd names. Sing How Can keeps a provision 
shop next to Diogenes Brathwaite's " Rum Parlor," flanked on the 
other side by Rahman Singh, the barber, who in his turn is shut in by 
the leather sandal factory of Pedro Vialva. Women in the striking 
costume of the French islands stroll past with a graceful, dignified 
carriage ; a man in a red fez pauses to talk to a man with a veritable 
clothshop wound about his head. Negro Beau Brummels speaking a 
laboriously learned English with an amusing accent, stately black police- 
men in spotless white jackets and helmets and those enormous shoes, 
shining like the proverbial " nigger's heel," worn by all British negroes 
in uniform, solemnly swinging their swagger-sticks with what suggests 
the wisdom of the ages until a chance question discloses how stupid they 
are under their impressive and patronizingly polite manner ; now and 
then a disgruntled Venezuelan general whom Castro or Gomez has 
forced to seek an asylum under the Union Jack ; a pair of sallow shop- 
keepers sputtering their nasal Portuguese — all mingle together in the 
passing throng. Then there are intermixtures of all these divergent 
elements, mainly of the younger generation — a negro boy with almond 
eyes, a youth who looks like a Hindu and a Chinaman, but is really 
neither, a flock of children with unusually coarse East Indian features 
and woolly hair playing about a one-room shop-residence the walls of 
which are papered negro-fashion with clippings from illustrated news- 
papers ; farther on a Portuguese rum-seller with a mulatto baby on his 
knee ; a few types who look like conglomerations of all the other races, 
until their family trees must sound like cocktail recipes. Both the 
Chinese and the Hindu residents of Trinidad are thrifty; many of 
them are well-to-do, for the former have indefatigable diligence in their 
favor, and the latter, who neither gamble nor steal, have no very serious 
faults, except the tendency to carve up their unfaithful wives. But 
there are failures among both races, even in this virgin island. Out- 
casts who were once Hindu or Chinese, sunk now to indescribable filth 
and raggedness, slink about with an eye open for a stray crust or 
cigarette butt. Under the saman trees in Marine Square East Indian 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 385 

derelicts dressed in nothing but a clout, a ragged jacket sometimes 
dropped in a vermin-infested heap beside them, are sleeping soundly 
on the stone pavement upon which white men, sipping their cocktails 
in the Union Club, look down as placidly as if they were gazing out 
the windows along Piccadilly. 

Modern street-cars carry this racial hash, or as much of it as 
can afford to ride, about the well-paved city and its shady suburbs. 
Single car-tickets cost six cents, but a strip of six may be had for a 
shilling. So many citizens are unable to invest this latter sum all at 
once, however, that numerous shopkeepers add to their profits by sell- 
ing the strip tickets at five cents each. Port of Spain has perhaps the 
finest pair of lungs of any city of its size in "the world. Beyond the 
business section is an immense savanna, smooth as a billiard-table — 
magnificent, indeed, it seems to the traveler who has seen no really level 
open ground for weeks — called Queen's Park. Here graze large herds 
of cattle, half Oriental, too, like the people. There is ample playground 
left, too, for all the city's population. In the afternoon, particularly 
of a Saturday, it presents a vast expanse of pastimes seldom seen in 
the tropics. The warning cry of " Fore ! " frequently startles the mere 
stroller, only to have his changed course bring him into a cluster of 
schoolboys shrilly cheering the prowess of their respective teams. The 
game which outdoes all others in popularity is that to the American 
incredibly stupid one of cricket, which rages — or should one say 
languishes ? — on every hand, notwithstanding the fact that Trinidad is 
within ten degrees of the equator. Nor is it monopolized by the better 
classes, for every group of ragged urchins who can scrape together 
enough to get balls, wickets, and that canoe-paddle the English call a 
" bat " takes turns in loping back and forth across the grass, to what 
end the scorer knows. If there is a color-line on the savanna, it is be- 
tween the few pure whites, many of them Englishmen who have " come 
out " within the present century and brought all the unconscious snob- 
bishness of their own island with them, and the olla podrida of all the 
other races. Among the latter the lines are social, rather than racial, 
so that Hindu-mulatto-Chinese youths, leaning on their canes, gaze 
with scornful indifference upon other youths of similar labyrinthian 
parentage whom chance has not raised to the dignity of annexing collars 
to their shirts. But there is room enough for all on the immense 
savanna. 

Here and there it is dotted with huge, spreading trees, which grow 
more thickly in the residential section surrounding it. The original 



386 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

inhabitants called the island " Iere," or " Cairi," meaning the " land of 
humming-birds." It is still that, but it is also the land of magnificent 
trees and the land of asphalt. One may doubt whether any fragment 
of the globe has so high a percentage of perfect streets and roads — no 
wonder, surely, when it may have its asphalt in unlimited quantities for 
the mere digging — and the giants of the forest which everywhere 
spread their canopies give its rather placid landscape a beauty which 
makes up for its lack of ruggedness. Behind Queen's Park is a delight- 
fully informal botanical garden in the middle of which sits the massive 
stone residence of the governor. Several times a week a band concert 
is given on his front lawn, a formality bearing slight resemblance to the 
Sunday-night gathering in a Spanish-American plaza. It takes place 
in the afternoon and is attended only by the elite, though this does not 
by any means confine it to Caucasian residents, for there are many 
others, at least of the island-born Chinese and Hindus and their inter- 
mixtures, who count themselves in this category, while negro and East 
Indian nursemaids are constantly pursuing their overdressed charges 
across the noiseless greensward. Any evidence of human interest is 
sternly suppressed in the staid and orderly gathering. They sit like 
automatons on their scattered chairs and benches, no one ever commit- 
ting the faux pas of speaking above a whisper. Woe betide the mere 
American who dares address himself to a stranger, for British snobbery 
reaches its zenith in Trinidad, and the open-handed hospitality of Bar- 
bados is painfully conspicuous by its absence. 

Trim lawns bordered with roses, hibiscus, poinsettia, variegated 
crotons, and a host of other brilliant-foliaged plants surround the home- 
like, though sometimes overdecorated, residences of the generously 
shaded suburbs. Over the verandas hang mantles of pink coronella, 
violet thumbergia, red bougainvillea, often interlacing, always a mass 
of bloom, at least in this summer month of April. Maidenhair ferns 
line the steps leading to the portico, rare orchids cling to the mammoth 
branches of the spreading trees, the air is sweetly fragrant with the 
odors of cape jasmine and the persistent patchouli. With sunset cigales, 
tree-toads, and a host of tropical insects begin to chirrup their nightly 
chorus — an improvement on the flocks of crowing roosters that make 
the whole night hideous in the town itself, not only in Port of Spain, 
but throughout the West Indies. 

A magistrate's court is an amusing scene in any of the Antilles; 
it is doubly so in the racial whirlpool of Trinidad. An English " lef ten- 
ant," assigned the task of prosecuting for the crown, but who never once 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 387 

opened his mouth, was the only white man present on the morning I 
visited this farcical melodrama. A mulatto magistrate whose offensive 
pride of position stuck out on him like a sore thumb held the center 
of the spotlight. Never did he let pass an opportunity to inflict the 
crudest of witticisms, the most stupid of sarcasm on prisoners and wit- 
nesses alike. In the language of English courts he was known as 
' Your Worship," a title by which even white men are frequently com- 
pelled to address those of his class in the British West Indies, where 
the law knows no color-line. A group of colored reporters sat below 
him in the customary railed enclosure, jotting down his every burst of 
alleged wit for the delectation of their next morning's readers, who 
would be regaled with such extraordinary moral truths as " His Wor- 
ship told the defendant that instead of living off his mother and sister he 
should go and do some honest work to support them and himself," or 
" His Worship remarked that the witness seemed to be afflicted with a 
clogging of his usually no doubt brilliant mental processes." Beyond 
the rail was packed the black audience that is never lacking at these 
popular entertainments in the British West Indies. 

The prisoners and the two pedestal-shod black policemen on either 
side of them, stood stiffly at attention just outside the rail during all the 
trial. Witnesses assumed a similar posture in a kind of pulpit, took 
the oath by kissing a dirty dog-eared Bible — even though they were 
Hindus or Chinese — and submitted themselves to " His Worship's " 
caustic sarcasm. The mere fact that the majority of them were 
patently and clumsily lying from beginning to end of their testimony did 
not appear to arouse a flicker of surprise in the minds of magistrate, 
the lawyers of like color, or the open-mouthed audience. The testi- 
mony in each case was laboriously written down in longhand by a 
dashingly attired mulatto clerk, though evidently not word for word, 
for these fell too fast and furiously to be caught in full. The accused 
was always given permission to cross-examine the witnesses, with the 
result that a vociferous quarrel frequently enlivened the proceedings. 
The majority of cases were petty in the extreme, matters which in most 
countries would have been settled out of court with a slap or a swift 
kick. But nothing so pleases the British West Indian, at least of the 
masses, as a chance to appear in the conspicuous role of plaintiff, or 
even as witness. One black fellow had charged another with calling 
his wife a " cat." " His Worship " found the case a source of unlimited 
platitudes before he dismissed it by adding five shillings to the crown's 
resources. A fat negress accused a long and scrawny one of offering 



388 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

to " box me face," and as British West Indian law takes account of 
threats, the lanky defendant was separated from her week's earnings, 
though she scored high with the audience by proving that the accuser 
had also used threatening language, thereby subjecting her to a similar 
financial disaster. 

Corporal punishment is still in vogue in the British Antilles. Two 
negro boys had been playing marbles, when one struck the other with a 
stick. " His Worship " ordered the defendant to receive ten strokes 
with a tamarind rod, to be administered by a member of the police force. 
The order was immediately executed in a back room to which casual 
spectators were not admitted. To judge from the shrieks that arose 
from it, the punishment was genuine, but they were probably designed 
to reach the magistrate's ear, for when I put an inquiry to the big 
black chastiser some time later, he replied with a grin, " Oh, not too 
hard; perhaps a tingle or two at the end jes' to make him remember." 
Even adults are not always spared bodily reminders. A vicious look- 
ing negro with a hint of Chinese ancestry who was convicted for the 
fourth time of thieving was sentenced to one year at hard labor and six 
lashes with the " cat." But as this punishment was inflicted at the 
general prison, there was no means of learning how thoroughly the 
implement was wielded. 

Though a Chinese and a Hindu interpreter were present, all the wit- 
nesses, happening to be youthful and evidently born in the colony, spoke 
perfect English — as it is spoken in Trinidad. It was somehow incon- 
gruous to hear a Hindu woman in her silken shroud and a small cart- 
load of jewelry burst forth, as soon as she had kissed the unsavory 
Bible with apparent fervor, in the negro-British dialect and contradict 
the assertions of the accused with some such rejoinder as " Whatyer 
tahlk, mahn, whatcher tahlk?" Those surprises are constantly being 
sprung on the visitor to Trinidad, however, for notwithstanding the 
composite of races and the fact that English was not introduced into 
the island until 1815, it is decidedly the prevailing language. It is a 
common experience to hear a group that is chattering in Hindustanee 
suddenly change to British slang, or to turn and find that the discussion 
of the latest cricket match in the broad-vowelled jargon of the British 
West Indian negro is between a Chinese and a Hindu youth, both 
dressed in the latest European fashion. Natives of the islands assert 
that " the English of a typical Trinidadian is probably as strongly in 
contrast to that of a typical Barbadian as the language of any two parts 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 389 

of the British Empire." But to the casual visitor they sound much 
alike, and far removed from our own tongue. We might readily under- 
stand the expression " I well glad de young mahn acquit," but few of us 
would recognize that " Don't let he break me, sir," means " Do not 
give him a job after refusing it to me." An incensed motorman cried 
out to a Chinese-Hindu negro hackman who was impeding his progress, 
' Why y'u don' go home wid dis cyart ef y'u can' drive et ? " to which 
came the placid reply, " Why you vex, mahn? Every victoria follow he 
own wheels." As in the French islands, a banana is called a " fig " in 
Trinidad, while walls are everywhere decorated with the warning 
" Stick no Bills." 

Speaking of bills of another sort, those of the smaller denominations 
are badly needed in the British islands. With the exception of Jamaica, 
they reckon their money in dollars and cents, but they are West Indian 
dollars, worth four shillings and two pence each and following the 
English pound in its rise or fall. Notes of five dollars are issued by the 
Colonial Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada, but with the exception 
of Trinidad and its dependency, Tobago, the government of which 
issues one- and two-dollar bills, there is no local small change, and the 
already overburdened visitor to these tropical climes must load himself 
down with a double handful of English silver and mammoth coppers 
each time he breaks a five-dollar bill. To add .to his struggles with the 
clumsy British monetary system, prices are given in cents, when there 
are no cents. Small articles in the shops are tagged 24c, 48c, 72c, 
and so on, never 25c, 50c, or 75c, which is easy enough, for those are 
the local terms for one, two, or three shillings. But it is not so simple 
for the heated and hurried stranger to calculate that the euphonism 
" thirty-nine cents " means a shilling, a sixpence, a penny, and a 4< ha'- 
penny," and to find the real significance of a demand for $5.35 requires 
either a pencil and paper or long practice in mental arithmetic. Perhaps 
the least fatiguing method is to spread on the counter the whole contents 
of one bulging pocket and trust to the clerk's honesty — except that he, 
too, even if he is trustworthy, is apt to -be weak in mental arithmetic. 
The fall in the value of the pound sterling following the war forced 
the Trinidad government to enact a new ordinance forbidding " the 
melting down of silver coins current in the colony, the keeping posses- 
sion of more silver than is needed for current expenses, or the buying 
or offering to buy silver coins at more than their face value." The 
drop in exchange had given the metal more worth than the coins them- 



390 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

selves, and the Hindu custom of turning the family wealth into brace- 
lets and anklets for the women was threatening to make small financial 
transactions impossible. 

Marital felicity is by no means universal in Trinidad, if one may 
judge from the columns of warnings to the public in its newspapers. 
In a single issue may be found a score of insertions testifying to this 
impression and to the mixture of races : 

The Public is hereby notified that I will not be responsible for any debt or 
debts contracted by my wife, Daisy Benjamin, she having left my house and 
protection. 

Izakiah Benjamin, 
Petit Valley, Diego Martin. 
The Public is hereby notified that I will not hold myself responsible for any 
debts contracted by my wife Eparaih, she being no longer under my protection 
and care. 

His 
Ram dow X 
Mark 
Bejucal, Caroni. 
Witness to Mark: Santiago Wilson. 

The Public is hereby notified that I will no longer be responsible for the debts 
of my wife, Yew Chin, she having left my house and protection without any 
just cause. 

Lee Wo Sing, 
Rock River Road, Penal. 

Occasionally the other side of the house is heard from : 

The Public are hereby warned that the undersigned will not be responsible for 
any debts contracted by my husband, Emmanuel Paul, as we are no longer as- 
sociated as husband and wife. 

Margaret Paul, 

Lance Noir, Toco. 

The Spanish influence may be seen in the custom of doctors an( 
dentists advertising " Lady in Attendance," to add reassurance to theii 
female clientele. 

The Government of Trinidad runs an excellent railway and coast 
steamer service. The cars are of three classes, with cross-seats, as in 
Europe, though with a few compartment partitions. Shades resem- 
bling cap-visors project over the windows, and the trains are as clean 
and orderly as those of Porto Rico. First class is small and exclusive, 
occupying only one third of a coach, and the rare traveler in it is apt 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 391 

to be taken for an important government official and saluted by all 
railway employees, and stared at with envy and astonishment by the 
" garden " variety of voyagers. Even the few white citizens usually 
travel second-class, though this is by no means free from African and 
Asiatic mixtures. The bulk of the train is made up of third-class 
coaches, their hard wooden benches crowded with every possible com- 
bination of negro, Hindu, Chinese, Venezuelan, Portuguese, and French 
blood, with an occasional poor white, and presents a truly cosmopolitan 
conglomeration of garb and tongue. Employees are as varied in origin. 
A big-bearded " collector," or station-agent, with Hindu features which 
seem strangely out of place under his placarded cap, rebukes a Chinese- 
Hindu passenger in the amusing " English " of the West Indies, then 
slaps a jet black " head guard " on the back with a " How goes? " and 
gets the reply, " Oh, getting on poc' a poc'." In addition to these 
vigilant ticket-seekers, there are inspectors whose official caps read 
" Head Examiner," a title which more than one stranger has miscon- 
strued. 

Trains are frequent. They are drawn by large oil-burning Montreal 
engines with white " drivers " and set forth from Port of Spain, like 
our own fliers, over a roadbed in excellent condition for the first 
twenty miles or more. Beyond that, as the line breaks up into its 
several branches, the engines get smaller and smaller ; the engineers 
become mulattoes, then blacks, with only a tropical sense of the value of 
time ; the tracks are more and more congested with train-loads of cane 
in the cutting season, with the result that a well-arranged time-table 
is often disrupted. Swampy stretches of mangroves to the right and 
left flank the first few miles. Groups of prisoners, in yellow, white, or 
orange-colored caps, according to whether they are misdemeanants, 
felons, or " long-timers," are turning some of these into solid ground. 
Cocoanut plantations soon supersede the swamps, to be in turn replaced 
by cane, as flat lands spread farther and farther away on the left 
to the base of high hills or low mountains rather arid in appearance, 
despite the density of their brush and forest, red trails here and there 
climbing their wooded flanks. 

Ten minutes out the considerable town of San Juan imposes the first 
halt, its platform seething with a multi-colored throng struggling with 
every manner of queer luggage. A few miles farther on, at the base 
of El Tucuche, the highest peak of Trinidad, is the old Spanish capital 
of the island, San Jose de Oruna, now called St. Joseph. Unlike the 
British, the conquistadores preferred to build their principal towns 



392 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

some miles back from the sea. It did them little good in this ease, 
however, for St. Joseph was burned to the ground by that prince of 
buccaneers, Sir Walter Raleigh, and here the Spanish governor, Chacon, 
surrendered the island to a superior British force in 1797 without a 
fight, which may be one of the reasons why a street of the old capital 
is named for him. St. Joseph lies a bit up hill from the station, with a 
magnificent view of the vast Caroni plain, a floor-flat vega dense 
with vegetation, dotted with villages, and here and there the stacks of 
sugar-mills, called ushies in Trinidad. Scattered, somewhat hilly, with 
the languid, capacious air of a village, the old capital is interesting to- 
day for its flora and its historical reminiscences. Veritable grand- 
fathers of trees, with long beards, their immense branches thickly 
grown with orchids and other flowering parasites, shade it at every 
hour of the day. Humming-birds flit in and out among its masses of 
red and purple bougainvillea. The trade wind, which seldom reaches 
Port of Spain, sweeps down through a break in the brownish-green 
hills which hem the former capital in; if it is uncomfortably hot at 
noonday, it is because all Trinidad is aware of its proximity to the 
equator. Of Spanish ruins it has none, but there are numerous Vene- 
zuelan inhabitants, and the Castilian tongue and customs have to some 
extent survived. Here, too, are strange interminglings of races and 
tongues — " El Toro Store " on Piccadilly Street ; a rum-shop called 
" The Trinidadians' Delight " on Buena Vista Street. In its dry and 
stony cemetery are monuments with Chinese, Spanish, Hindu, French 
and English names, some of the last all too evidently those of negroes. 

The newspapers of Trinidad announced a " Big Field Day and Race 
meeting " at Tunapuna, a few miles beyond St. Joseph, on Easter 
Monday. Having lived through five British holidays in the brief ten 
days since our landing in Barbados, we ventured to hope that here 
might be something less deadly dull. Had we paused to reflect, we 
should have known that white people did not attend these popular 
festivities. The horror on the face of an English native to whom we 
mentioned our destination might have given us the same information, 
had we not taken it to be an £xpression of pain at being addressed 
without a formal introduction. 

Tunapuna is as Hindu as St. Joseph is Spanish. The domes, or, 
more exactly, spheres of a white Brahmin temple bulk high above its low 
houses. These are little mud-plastered houses, for the most part, with 
dents poked in their walls before they have dried, by way of decoration, 
which seem to be direct importations from India. The broad asphalt 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 393 

highway bisecting the town was as seething a stream of humanity as 
the Great Trunk Road. Hindus in their anklets and toe-rings, their 
clanking bracelets and light-colored flowing garments, made up the 
bulk of the throng, with here and there a Venezuelan driving a pack- 
laden donkey to give contrast to the picture. If the place had a Eu- 
ropean section, it eluded our attention ; it looked like a village of India 
in which a few African settlers had taken up their residence. 

The " field day " was held on a broad level space in the center of 
town. Constant streams of vari-colored Trinidadians, all clad in their 
most gasp-provoking holiday attire, poured into it from special trains 
that arrived in close succession. A bandstand covered with palm- 
leaves had been erected for the higher social orders, but even this was 
no place for a white spectator who did not care to arouse conspicuous 
attention. There were perhaps half a dozen white men, all British 
soldiers, scattered through the hilarious throng, but not a woman of her 
own race to keep Rachel in countenance. Of near- whites there was 
no scarcity, all of them affecting the haughty English manner in the 
vain hope of concealing the African in their family wood-pile. Some 
of the mixtures of race, language, and custom were incredible. Next 
to us sat a woman who appeared to be half Hindu and half English, 
who spoke Spanish, and who carried a quadroon baby with straw- 
colored hair and almond-shaped blue eyes. We awarded her the palm 
for human conglomeration, but there were many more who could have 
run her a close race. 

The contests consisted mainly of bicycle races, an uproarious hubbub 
invariably breaking out among the motley judges and officials after each 
of them, causing great delay before the shotgun which served as starting 
pistol set the stage for a new controversy. In view of the fact that 
the contestants were vari-colored youths who probably lived in un- 
painted shanties and wore shoes only on Sundays, the tableful of prizes 
beside us was amusing. Among them we noted a gold-plated jewel-box, 
a cut-glass fruit-dish, an ice-cream freezer, a gold-scrolled liqueur set, 
a hatstand of gilt-tipped ox-horns, two manicure sets, a pair of marble 
horses, and several overdecorated small clocks. One of the many 
dandies who were continually displaying their graces to the feminine 
portion of the stand, under the pretense of finding the open space before 
it more comfortable than the chairs, protested that the prizes " lacked 
show." Up to that moment that had seemed to us the one thing they 
did not lack. This particular individual, a mulatto with a touch of 
Chinese, wore a tweed coat and white flannel trousers, an artificial 



394 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

daisy in his buttonhole, a brown necktie embroidered at the top with 
flowers and at the bottom with the word " Peace " in large letters, and 
carried a riding-crop. Those of his companions who were not armed 
with this latter sign of field-officer rank all bore canes. One of them 
flaunted a cravat decorated with the flags of all the Allies. The ma- 
jority frequently removed their hats, regardless of the blazing sunshine, 
quite evidently for the purpose of showing that their hair was not 
curly, an improvement for which several quite evidently had to thank 
" Mme. Walker's Peerless Remedies." An inattentive spectator might 
have concluded from the wagers shouted back and forth among them 
at the beginning of each race that they were persons of unlimited 
wealth, but it was noticeable that very little money actually changed 
hands. Here, too, the lines of demarkation were social, rather than 
racial. A Hindu youth dressed in the latest imitation of London 
fashion might call across the compound to his equally ornate Chinese 
friend, " Heh, Lee ! Come down, mahn ! " but he gave no sign of seeing 
the East Indian in khaki and a battered felt hat who sold peanuts in 
tiny measures cleverly arranged so that most of the nuts stuck to the 
bottom when they were upturned in the purchaser's hand. 

Beyond Tunapuna next day other Hindus in the loose garb of their 
homeland were clawing about the rice blades in their little paddy-fields, 
cut up into small squares by low dikes. Wattled huts, with East 
Indians squatted on their heels in the bare, hard-trodden spaces before 
them, intermingled with wooden shanties, sometimes with lace cur- 
tains at the glassless windows, shanties fairly bursting with their swarm- 
ing negro families. Tall, slender flagpoles from which flew little red 
flags, some of them already bleached white, showed where goats had 
been sacrificed in the frequent ceremonies of the Brahmin inhabitants. 
Little white Hindu temples alternated with small negro churches. 
Through Tacarigua, with its clusters of buildings flung far up the red- 
scarred hillsides, Arouca, Dabadie, the procession of huts and cabins 
continued. Almost without exception they were unpainted and un- 
adorned with anything but the barest necessities, for Trinidad, too, 
labors under the discouraging " improvement tax." 

Arima, the last settlement of the aborigines before they disappeared 
from the island as a race, spreads over a slightly elevated plateau, its 
wide streets and well separated houses giving an impression of unlimited 
elbow-room, its huge trees and flowery shrubbery making up for its 
dry-goods-box style of architecture. Here is Trinidad's chief race- 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 



395 



track, enclosing a grassy playground that almost rivals Port of Spain's 
savanna, but the incessant staring of the inhabitants suggests that 
white men are ordinarily rare sights in this important cacao center, as 
they are in many sections of the island. 

Beyond Arima the hills die out and for miles the track is walled by 
uncultivated brush or virgin forests, with only a rare frontier-like vil- 
lage and a few young cacao plantations sheltered from the sun by the 
bois immortel, or what Spaniards call madre del cacao. Hindus are 
more numerous in this region than negroes. The railway ends at the 
thriving town of Sangre Grande, though it hopes soon to push on to 
the east coast. Chinese merchants and the resultant half-breeds are 
unusually numerous; Hindu women in full metallic regalia, sitting in 
buggies like farmers' wives in our western prairie towns, some of them 
smoking little Irish-looking clay pipes, and silversmiths of the same 
race, naked but for a clout, plying their trade in back alleys, are among 
the sights of the place. 

The Ford mail-and-passenger bus in which I continued my journey 
was driven by a youth, whose grandparents were respectively Chinese, 
Hindu, negro, and white. The first had given him an emotionless 
countenance and a strict attention to business, the second a slender, 
almost girlish form and a silky complexion, the third wavy hair and an 
explosive laughter, and the last frequent attacks of that haughty surli- 
ness so common to mulattoes or quadroons. Among the passengers 
was a Hindu girl of striking beauty. She spoke excellent English with 
a strong West Indian accent, was tastefully and specklessly dressed in 
a Caucasian waist, black silk skirt, and kid shoes, wore her silky black 
hair done up in European fashion, and had the manners of an English 
debutante of the sheltered class. Yet in her nose she wore two gold 
rings, her arms gleamed with silver bracelets from wrists to elbows, 
about her neck was a string of heavy gold coins, and a flowered silk 
wrap was flung about her shoulders and head. Beside her sat a youth 
of the same race, completely Europeanized in garb and manner. In 
front, separated from this pair by one of the slow-witted, scornful 
negroes who filled most of the two seats, was an East Indian in full 
white Hindu regalia, — a simple, faintly purple turban, white caste 
marks across his forehead and in front of his ears, and a string of 
black, seed-like beads about his neck. Not once during the journey did 
he give a sign of recognition to his Anglicized compatriots. 

We snorted away along an asphalt highway bordered by large cacao 
estates, passing many automobiles, some of them driven by Chinese and 



396 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Hindus, even through a great forest with many immense trees, their 
branches laden with orchids and climbing vines. Except for one low 
ridge the country was flat, with not even a suggestion of the rugged 
scenery of most West Indian islands. Long hedges of hibiscus in full 
red bloom lined the way through the considerable town of Matura, 
where negroes far outranked the Hindus in numbers and Chinamen 
kept virtually all the shops. Soon the landscape turned to cocoanut 
plantations, the now narrow road mounted somewhat, and the Atlantic 
spread out before us. But it was shallow and yellowish, not at all 
like the sea-lashed east coasts of Barbados or Dominica, the shores of 
its many bays and indentations low and heavily wooded, a hazy clump 
of hills stretching far away into the south. Then came a cluster of 
ridges and mounds of earth covered with primeval forest, only little 
patches of which had been cleared to give place to the most primitive, 
weather-beaten thatched huts. These were scattered at long intervals 
along the way and all inhabited by negroes, the other races evidently 
finding the region too undeveloped for their more civilized taste. Nine- 
teen miles from Sangre Grande the bus halted at a cluster of hovels 
on Balandra Bay, the road, which pushes on to the northeast point of 
the island, being impassable for vehicles. 

From that point one may see the important island of Tobago, the 
chief of Trinidad's dependencies and the most recent of England's 
possessions in the West Indies. It is reputed to have been the most 
fiercely contested bit of ground in the western hemisphere, having 
been constantly disputed by the French, Spanish, and English, until it 
finally fell to the latter in 1803. To this day it is surrounded by the 
ruins of old forts. French names still survive in its capital, Scar- 
borough, and the splendid system of roads it once boasted have been 
allowed to go back to bush under British rule. In 1889 it was annexed 
to Trinidad, though it retains its own elective financial board. Like 
many of the British West Indies, Tobago has seen the insolence and 
aggressiveness of its negroes greatly increased by the example of those 
who were debauched in France, and was forced to suppress one riot 
with considerable bloodshed. The island may be reached weekly by 
government steamer from Port of Spain. 

At St. Joseph the more important branch of the railway turns south 
and, sending an offshoot through a fertile cacao district and the oil 
regions about Tabaquite to Rio Claro, follows the coast of the Gulf 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 397 

of Paria to the edge of the southern chain of hills. A so-called express 
train connects the capital with the metropolis of the south once a week, 
but on account of the English " staff system " in vogue, its speed is 
frequently checked and sophisticated passengers get on or off as it 
slows up at each station to exchange the iron hoop which is the en- 
gineer's passport for the ensuing section. Broad, flat vegas spread on 
either hand beyond the old Spanish capital, the northern range of hills 
withdrawing to the edge of the horizon. Great pastures with huge 
spreading trees, some of them gay with blossoms, and thick clumps of 
bamboo alternate with extensive cane-fields, most of them covered with 
the young shoots after the recent cutting in this April season. Here 
and there stands a large usine, or sugar-mill, with long rows of coolie 
dwellings, some housing a dozen families side by side, while outside the 
estate are crowded together the tin-roofed shacks of the negro and 
Hindu workmen who prefer to house themselves, rather than submit 
to the exacting sanitary rules of the company. The fields that are still 
uncut have those fat yellow canes with long joints that are the joy 
of the sugar grower, for the Caroni plain is famed for its fertility. 
Humped Indian bulls and their tropic-defying offspring dot the pastures 
and corrals. From Cannpia a road leads to Alligator Village, where 
Hindus may be seen standing naked and motionless on their flimsy 
little rafts made of woven palm-fronds catching cascadura, the choicest 
delicacy of Trinidad. The natives have a saying that whoever tastes 
the flesh of this cross between a turtle and a lizard must return to end 
his days in the island. 

Cacao plantations, shaded by forests of high trees, gradually replace 
the cane-fields as the train speeds southward. Parasites and climbing 
lianas, that death-dealing vine called matapalo by the Spaniards and 
" Scotch attorney " by the Trinidadians, which finally chokes to death 
the tree that sustains it, usurping its heritage of nourishment, give the 
forest wall the appearance of a great carelessly woven tapestry. 
Wattled huts as primitive as those of Haiti, many of them of spreading 
cone shape, thrust their thatched roofs above the vegetation, giving 
many a vista a touch that carries the mind back to India. Chaguanas, 
Carapichaima, Couva — the towns nearly all bear Spanish names — 
are populous, though California has a mere handful of hovels. Near 
the last the low wooded foothills of the central range begin to peer 
above the flat cane and cacao lands to the left; then the train bursts 
suddenly out on the edge of the gulf amid a flurry of cocoanut palms. 



398 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Claxton's Bay and Point-a-Pierre again recall Trinidad's mixture of 
tongues, and at length the staff-hampered " express " staggers into 
San Fernando. 

The second city of Trinidad has but ten thousand inhabitants. It is 
strewn over a clump of wooded knolls at the base of Naparima Hill, 
rising six hundred feet above it. Its population is so overwhelmingly 
East Indian that even the English residents are forced to learn Hindu- 
stanee. " His Worship," the mayor, is a Hindu ; on certain days of 
the week the visitor who strolls through its wide, asphalted streets 
might easily fancy himself in a market city of central India. Such 
signs as " Sultan Khan, Pawn Broker," "Samaroo, Barber," or '* Jagai, 
Licensed to Deal in Cacao and Licenseable Produce " are triply as 
numerous as the shops bearing such patently negro mottoes as " To 
Trust is to Burst." 

A toy train runs from San Fernando through rolling fields of cane 
to Prince's Town, which name it adopted in honor of a visit long years 
ago by the present king and his brother. The " staffs " in this case 
are human. Every mile or less the engineer halts to take on board 
from a kind of sentry-box a uniformed negro wearing a bright red 
cap — which, no doubt, makes it possible to reduce his wages by half 
— stenciled with the number of the section for which he is responsible. 
Prince's Town lies in the Naparima plain, the second of Trinidad's 
great fertile vcgas; or one may visit another portion of it by continuing 
to the end of the main line. On the way are Debe, almost wholly a 
Hindu town, with a stream of many castes pouring down its highway, 
and Penal, with its miles of Hindu vegetable gardens and its mud-and- 
reed huts that seem to have been transported direct from India. Then 
comes a long run through an almost uninhabited wilderness, though 
with considerable cacao on its low, jungle-like hills, and finally Siparia, 
a rapidly growing frontier village where busses and automobiles are 
waiting to carry travelers to the slightly developed southern side of the 
island. 

As we raced back down the hill again my hitherto private first-class 
compartment — no, I shall not divulge the secret of why I chanced to be 
displaying this sign of opulence and snobbishness — was invaded by the 
first American I had met in Trinidad outside the capital. He was an 
oil-driller from one of the newly developed fields. But though he had 
been drawing three times the salary of a college professor, he had 
•' threw up the job because me an' that there field-man did n't hitch. 
He's only a Britisher, anyway." What might have been a pleasant 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 399 

conversation was disrupted by my new companion with such remarks as 
" Panama ? Where 's that ? Up towards New Orleans ? " " Hindus ? 
Is them Hindus with rings in their noses? I thought them was East 
Indians." There is a saying in Trinidad, as in many other parts of the 
world, that only fools or Americans ride first-class. This man was 
both, for he was " afraid to go second for fear my friends '11 see me 
an' think I 'm goin' broke " — an impression that would not have been 
at fault, as he had " blowed " his princely wages as fast as he earned 
them. 

The favorite excursion from Port of Spain is that by government 
steamer through the Bocas Islands, which are scattered along the north- 
western horn of Trinidad. First comes a cluster of jagged rocks 
with a few large trees, called Five Islands, government-owned and 
occupied by from one to three houses each, which may be rented by 
the week when they are not in use as quarantine stations. On one of 
them is the principal prison of the colony, and convicts in charge of a 
guard row out for the supplies and mail from town. Indeed, the 
journey is a constant succession of rowboat parties, not to say mishaps, 
for it is frequently blowing a gale about the Bocas, and as the steamer 
nowhere ventures close to shore, passengers and groceries are often 
subjected to thorough duckings, if nothing worse. The larger islands 
are privately owned, and dotted with pretentious " summer " homes 
of those who cannot spend the hottest months in Grenada or Barbados. 
An entire bay of one of them belongs to the son of the inventor of one 
of Trinidad's most famous products, " Angostura Bitters." I am not 
in a position to divulge the secret of its manufacture, beyond stating 
that it contains rum, mace, nutmeg, and powdered orange skins, which 
latter detail accounts for the fact that the market-women of Port of 
Spain pare their oranges as we do an apple and that the stone fences 
of the town are always littered with orange-peelings drying in the 
sun. 

Monos Island lies beyond the mainland, and between that and the 
last and largest, rejoicing in the name of Chacachacare, are several 
bocas, or channels, through which pass steamers touching at Trinidad. 
The colony was in an uproar at the time of our visit because the 
government had proposed to turn Chaca — but why repeat it all? — 
over to the lepers. Thanks largely to its Hindu population, Trinidad 
has more than its share of these sufferers, and though they are " iso- 
lated " in an asylum on the mainland or in their own homes, they are 



4 oo ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

frequently found mingling with holiday throngs. Trinidadians pro- 
tested against advertising the prevalence of leprosy by housing the in- 
valids on the most conspicuous part of the colony, and the charge of 
graft was as freely bantered back and forth as in our own merry land 
under similar conditions. From Chacachacare one may see a great 
stretch of Venezuela across the straits, the spur of the Andes on which 
sits Caracas rising higher and higher into the sky and disappearing at 
length in the direction of lofty Bogota. 

But to most strangers Trinidad has little meaning except as the home 
of the " asphalt lake." Strictly speaking, it is neither the one nor the 
other, being rather a pitch deposit, but it would be foolish to quibble 
over mere words. It is sufficient to know that the spot furnishes most 
of the asphalt for the western hemisphere. 

To reach it one must return to San Fernando by train and continue 
by government steamer. This frequently flees before the ebbing tide 
and anchors far out in the shallow, yellowish gulf until its passengers 
have been rowed aboard, then turns southwest along a flat, uninteresting 
coast. The pea-soup-colored sea swarms with jelly-fish that resemble 
huge acorns in shape and color and on which whales come to feed at 
certain seasons. Among them floats another species with long tendrils, 
a mere touch of which leaves a sharply stinging sensation for hours 
afterward. The steamer touches at half a dozen villages down the 
long southern prong of Trinidad, rounding the point twice a week to 
Icacos, reputed the largest cocoanut plantation in the world. It is 
owned by an old Corsican who " came out " in his youth as a porter, 
and who, in the words of the captain, " is of no class at all," yet he has 
a mansion in Port of Spain, several daughters married to French 
counts, and so much money '•' he does n't know arithmetic enough to 
count it." 

But our interests are in the first port of call out of San Fernando. 
A bit beyond the reddish town of La Brea (the Spanish word for 
pitch) a very long pier with an ocean steamer at the far end of it and 
iron buckets flying back and forth between it and the land, like a pro- 
cession of sea-gulls feeding their young, juts out into the gulf. Not 
so many years ago all the population of this spot, called Brighton, lived 
on the pier, the shore being famous for a fever that brought almost 
certain death within two days. This completely disappeared, however, 
when American concessionists turned the jungle into pasture land. The 
air is full of pelicans, clumsily diving for fish or awaiting their turn for 
a seat on the protruding jib boom of a wrecked schooner, along which 







Trinidad has many Hindu temples 




Very much of a lodge 




At the "Asphalt Lake' 




There is water, too, in the crevices of the asphalt field 



TRINIDAD, THE LAND OF ASPHALT 401 

others sat as tightly crowded together as subway passengers in the 
evening rush-hour. 

We landed with misgiving, having often heard of " that terrible walk " 
from the pier to the " lake." No doubt it seems so to many a tourist, 
being nearly ten minutes long up a very gentle slope by a perfect 
macadam highway. Beside it buckets are constantly roaring past on 
elevated cables, carrying pitch to the ship or returning for a new load 
with an almost human air of preoccupation. The highway leads to 
the gate of a yard with a mine-like reduction plant peopled with tar- 
smeared negroes, immediately behind which opens out the " lake." 

The far-famed deposit is not much to look at. It is a slightly con- 
cave, black patch of a hundred acres, with as definite shores as a lake 
of water, surrounded by a Venezuelan landscape of scanty brush and 
low, thirsty palms. To the left the black towers of half a dozen oil- 
wells break the otherwise featureless horizon. About the surface of 
the hollow several groups of negroes work leisurely. One in each 
group turns up with every blow of his pick a black, porous lump of 
pitch averaging the size of a market-basket ; the others bear these away 
on their heads to small cars on narrow tracks, along which they are 
pushed by hand to the ,l factory." That is all there is to it ; an easier 
job for all concerned would be hard to find. A trade wind sweeps 
almost constantly across the field, the pitch is so light that the largest 
lump is hardly a burden, from the nature of the case the pace is not 
fast, and the workers are so constantly in sight that an overseer is hardly 
needed, nor piece-work required. The men are paid eighty cents a 
day of ten hours, which seems much to them and little to their em- 
ployers, producing mutual satisfaction. The work calls for no skill 
whatever ; it is carried on in the open air, with women venders of food 
and drink free to come and go; on the side of the concessionists the 
deposit offers not even the difficulty of transportation, being barely a 
mile from the ship, furnishing its own material for the necessary 
roads, and virtually inexhaustible. The holes dug during the day fill 
imperceptibly and are gone by morning, the deepest one ever excavated 
having disappeared in three days. Only a small fraction of the field 
is exploited; it could easily keep all the ships of the world busy. 
Should it ever be exhausted, there is a still larger deposit just across 
the bay in Venezuela. In the slang of financial circles, "it is like 
finding it." 

The lake is soft underfoot, like a tar sidewalk in midsummer, the 
heels sinking out of sight in a minute or two, and has a faint smell of 



402 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

sulphur. In a few places it is not solid enough to sustain a man's 
weight, though children and the barefooted workmen scamper across 
it anywhere at sight of a white visitor for the inevitable British West 
Indian purpose of demanding " a penny, please, sir." A crease remains 
around each hole as it refills, some of these rolling under like the edge 
of a rising mass of dough, and in these crevices, the rain gathers in 
puddles of clear, though black-looking, water in which the surrounding 
families do their washing. Only negroes are employed as laborers; 
the twenty-five white men in the higher positions are nearly all A'^°-' 
cans, those with families housed in company bungalows on the slope 
above the gulf, the bachelors in a company hotel. Most of the pitch 
goes directly to the steamer, but as it is one-third water, and royalties, 
duties, and transportation are paid by weight, a certain proportion is 
boiled in vats in the " factory " and shipped in barrels constructed on 
the spot. From the vat-platforms spreads out a vast panorama, with 
San Fernando at the base of its lonely hill, Port of Spain on its gently 
sloping plain, the entire Gulf of Paria, the Bocas Islands, and the moun- 
tains of eastern Venezuela all in plain sight. 

The pitch lake was known even in the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, 
who " payed " his vessels here during lulls in buccaneering, but it has 
been exploited only during the last few decades. Three hundred thou- 
sands tons have been shipped during a single year, the revenue to the 
Government of Trinidad in 1912 being £63,453. Indeed, one of the 
main reasons why the island has a much more prosperous air than its 
neighbors is that millions have been paid into its treasury in royalties 
and duties from its only " lake." When a steamer is loading, buckets 
and negroes toil all through the night in the glare of electric-lights. 
The barrels of the refined product were first stowed on their sides, but 
as they flattened out into a four hundred pound cube that could neither 
be rolled nor lifted, they are now stood on end, tier after tier. The 
crude pitch becomes a solid mass during the journey north, and must 
be dug up again with picks when it reaches Perth Amboy. 



CHAPTER XVII 

AFRICAN JAMAICA 

IT may be that our affection for Jamaica is tempered by the diffi- 
culties we had in reaching it. Lying well inside the curve described 
by the other West Indies, the scarcity of shipping caused by the 
World War has left it almost unattainable from any of the other islands 
and hardly to be reached, except directly from New York or Panama. 
We first attempted to visit it from Santiago de Cuba, early in our 
journey. But as this would have meant spending an interminable 
twenty-four hours, and perhaps much more, on a little coasting-steamer 
not even fit for the " slave traffic " in which it is chiefly engaged, at 
a fare equal to that from §t. Thomas to Barbados in an ocean liner, 
the depositing of an equal amount to pay the expenses of a very prob- 
able quarantine of a week because of a few scattered cases of small- 
pox in Cuba, and the unwinding of a formidable mesh of red tape, we 
decided to defer our call and pick up the island on the way home. 
That surely would be easy, we concluded, for traffic certainly should 
be frequent between the two largest of the British West Indies. Ar- 
rived in Trinidad, however, we found that island as completely cut off 
from Jamaica as if they belonged to two enemy powers. We at length 
succeeded in coaxing the captain of a British freighter — the most 
pleasant craft, by the way, of all our journey — touching at every port 
on the north coast of South America and spending three weeks on the 
way, to carry us to Panama, whence another steamer bore us back 
again to several Colombian ports and eventually landed us in Jamaica 
seven weeks after leaving Trinidad. Had we not set our hearts on 
making our tour of the West Indies complete, we should have long 
since invited the principal British island to withdraw to a sphere where 
the temperature is reputed to be more than tropical. 

The first view of Jamaica and of its capital is pleasing. A moun- 
tainous mass, gradually developing on the horizon, grows into a series 
of ranges which promise to rival the beauty of Porto Rico. Beyond 
a long, low, narrow, sand-reef lies an immense harbor, on the further 
shore of which Kingston is suspected, rather than seen, only a few 
wharves and one domed building rising above the wooded plain on 

403 



4 04 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

which the low city stands. The hills behind it tumble into a disordered 
heap culminating in the cloud-swathed peak of what are most fittingly 
called the Blue Mountains. On this strip of sand, known as the Pali- 
sadoes, lies buried the famous buccaneer, Sir Henry Morgan, once 
governor of Jamaica, and at the extreme end of it stands the remnant 
of the old capital, Port Royal. In the good old days of pirates, who 
made it their headquarters, the depository of their loot, and the scene 
of their debauchery, this was the most important town in the West 
Indies, some say the richest and most wicked spot on earth. One must 
be chary, however, of too hastily granting such superlatives. An earth- 
quake befell it one day, sinking all but a fragment of the town beneath 
the sea, and a new capital, named Kingston, was founded on what 
promised to be safer ground across the bay. A later century brought 
regret that a still more distant site had not been chosen. To-day Port 
Royal consists of a quarantine station and a small village so isolated 
from the mainland that servant women brought from it to the capital 
have been known to shriek w r ith dismay at sight of their first cow. 
Ships circling the reef on their way in or out of the harbor sail over 
the very spot where pirates once held their revels, and negro boatmen 
still assert that on stormy evenings one may hear the tolling of Port 
Royal's cathedral bell, lying fathoms deep beneath the waves. 

One's first impression of the Jamaicans, as they lounge about the 
wharf eyeing each trunk or bundle several minutes before summoning 
up the energy to tackle it, is that they are far less courageous in the face 
of work than their cousins, the Barbadians. This is closely followed 
by the discovery that Kingston is the most disappointing town in the 
West Indies. With the exception of a few bright yellow public build- 
ings and a scattered block or two of new business houses, it is a negro 
slum, spreading for miles over a dusty plain. Scarcely a street has 
even the pretense of a pavement; the few sidewalks that exist are 
blocked by stairways, posts, and the trash of a disorderly population, 
or degenerate every few yards into stretches of loose stones and earth. 
The only building worth crossing the street to see is that domed structure 
sighted from the bay, the Catholic cathedral. To be sure, the earth- 
quake wrought great havoc, but that was thirteen years ago, time 
enough, surely, in which to have made a much farther advance toward 
recovery. 

The insolence of nearly all the British West Indies reaches its zenith 
in Kingston. Even in the main street clamoring black urchins and 
no small number of adults trail the white visitor, heaping upon him 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 405 

foul-mouthed taunts, all but snatching his possessions out of his hands 
in broad daylight ; diseased beggars plod beside him in bare feet that 
seem never to have known the luxury of a scrubbing, scattering their 
germs in a fine gray limestone dust that swirls in blinding clouds which 
envelop everything in a yellowish veil whenever a breath of wind stirs 
or a street-car sweeps past. Loose-mannered black females ply their 
trade with perfect impunity, shrieking worse than indecencies at un- 
responsive passers-by ; assaults and robbery are frequent even by day. 
One must be vaccinated and often quarantined before entering Jamaica, 
yet it is doubtful whether any island of the West Indies has more 
evidence of disease than Kingston itself. Those who carry firearms 
must deposit them at the custom house, yet with the possible exception 
of Hispaniola, a revolver is more often needed in the Jamaican capital 
than anywhere in the Caribbean, as several harmless Chinese merchants 
learned to their sorrow during our brief stay there. The town is dis- 
mal, disageeable, and unsafe for self-respecting white women at any 
hour ; by night it is virtually abandoned to the lawless black hordes 
that infest it. Weak gas-lights give it scarcely a suggestion of illumi- 
nation; swarms of negroes shuffle through the hot dust, cackling their 
silly laughter, shouting their obscenity, heckling, if not attacking, the 
rare white men who venture abroad, love-making in perfect indifference 
to the proximity of other human beings, while the pompous black police- 
men look on without the slightest attempt to quell the disorder. 

The white residents of Kingston seem to live in fear of the black 
multitude that make up the great bulk of the population. When hood- 
lums and rowdies jostle them on the street, they shift aside with a slink- 
ing air; even when black hooligans cling to the outside of street-cars 
pouring out obscene language, the white men do not shield their wives 
and daughters beside them by so much as raising their voices in protest. 
When cursing, filthy market women pile their baskets and unwashed 
produce in upon them and crowd their own women out of their places, 
they bear it all with humble resignation, as if they were the last sur- 
vivors of the civilized race wholly disheartened by an invasion of 
barbarian tribes. The visitor who flees all this and retires is lucky to 
catch half an hour of unbroken sleep amid the endless uproar of 
shouting negroes, the barking of innumerable dogs, and the crowing of 
more cocks than even a Latin-American city can muster. It would be 
difficult, indeed, to say anything bad enough of Kingston to give the full, 
hot, dusty, insolent, half-ruined picture. The traveler will see all he 
wants and more of the capital in the time he is forced to remain there 



4 o6 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

on the way to or from his ship without including a stay in his itinerary. 
Port au Prince is clean and gentlemanly in comparison. 

The electric street-cars, manned by ill-mannered crews and rocking 
like ships in a storm over the earthquake-undulated ground, run far 
out of town. They must, in order to reach anywhere worth going. 
Beyond Half Way Tree the sloping Liguanea plain grows green and 
the rain that seems never to descend to Kingston gives the vegetation 
a fresher coat, yet the way is still lined for a long distance by negro 
shacks. Only when one reaches the open meadows of Constant Spring 
or the residence section served by another branch of the line does any- 
thing approaching comfort, cleanliness, and peace appear. Yet even 
the boasted Hope Gardens, set far back at the base of the Blue Mountain 
range, have little of the open, breezy beauty of the Queen's Park in 
Trinidad. Until he has drifted farther afield, the stranger will not 
cease to wonder what charms bring Jamaica its large colony of winter 
tourists. Even then he must conclude that the prevalence of a tongue 
closely enough resembling English to be sometimes comprehensible and 
the legal existence of John Barleycorn give the island its handicap over 
Porto Rico. 

Unlike the other British West Indies, Jamaica clings to the English 
monetary system. The two colonial banks issue pound notes and 
higher, which are easily mistaken for those in dollars from the other 
islands, as more than one new cashier has discovered too late to rescue 
his first month's salary. The word " dollar " is frequently heard, but 
it is merely a popular euphonism for four shillings. Then there are 
local pennies and half-pennies of nickel alloy that are not readily dis- 
tinguished from the English shilling and two-shilling pieces. Jamaica 
belongs to the postal union, but, unlike the other colonies of the empire, 
she does not subscribe to the British postal convention with the United 
States, with the result that visitors commonly find their letters taxed 
three pence extra postage, to the continual advantage of the local gov- 
ernment. 

This latter gives the impression of being both backward and clumsy. 
A governor and a privy council of not more than eight members are 
appointed by the crown. The legislative body is presided over by the 
former and consists of five of the latter, ten other crown appointees, and 
a custos, elected by the people, from each of the fourteen parishes. 
British male subjects of twenty-one who occupy house property and 
pay taxes of thirty shillings, or who receive a nominal salary of fifty 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 407 

shillings a year, are qualified voters. A recent enactment gives the 
few women possessing certain qualifications a limited right to vote. 
Parish boards can recommend legislation, but only the high colonial 
officials can actually make laws or pay out money. No bills involving 

; questions of finance are passed if opposed by nine elective members, 
yet those same cnstodes cannot initiate legislation. Moreover, the king 
may disallow any law within two years of its passing. The result is 
a division of responsibility from power and frequent deadlocks that 

* make the apparent autonomy of the island a continual process of 

I " standing pat." 

The few white officials are slow, antiquated, precedence-ridden, in 
striking contrast to the young and bustling, if sometimes poorly in- 
formed rulers of our own dependencies. Indeed, a journey to the 
West Indies is apt to cause the American to rearrange his notions of 

i the relative efficiency of the English, and the French or ourselves, as 
colonizers. We are sadly in need of a Colonial Office and a corps of 
trained officials to administer what we dislike to call our colonies, but 

' even our deserving Democrats, or Republicans, as the case may be, 
scarcely hamper the development of our dependencies as thoroughly as 

i do its medieval-minded rulers that of Jamaica. An example or two 
will suffice to illustrate the point. The government railway was lifted 
out of its slough of despond and rehabilitated by an experienced ad- 

■ ministrator. When he found, however, that his £1000 a year did not 
suffice to keep him in shoes, the insular powers let him go rather than 
increase his pittance. Back in the Middle Ages that was a generous 
stipend for railway managers. By a recent law the Government of 
Jamaica has decided to take over the making, and later the distribution, 
of rum. At the time of our departure it was advertising for " an 
experienced superintendent " at the breath-taking salary of £2000 a 
year! No doubt there was a rush of managers of Cuban sugar cen- 

I trals contending for this noble prize. 

It may be of interest to know that Jamaica is livid with fear that she, 
too, may be struck by prohibition, and is hastily erecting all manner of 

I protective lightning-rods. Her newspapers carry columns of argu- 
ments pro and con, most of them clinched with quotations from the 
Bible, as if that had anything to do with the case. Reading the im- 

I passioned utterances of the " wets," one might suppose that the United 

I States is in the act of organizing a great army of grape-juicers to de- 

[ scend upon Jamaica and wrest from her all bottled joy in life, while 
the casual observer gets the impression that the great majority of the 



4 o8 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

islanders would rather die at the doors of their rum distilleries and 
liquor shops than suffer that ignominious fate. 

With the exception of Barbados, where special conditions exist, 
Jamaica has remained a possession of the British crown longer than 
any other land, and the influence of the English on the African race can 
perhaps nowhere be better studied. It is not particularly flattering. 
The Jamaican has all the faults of his rulers and his own negro delin- 
quencies to boot. He is slow-witted, inhospitable, arrogant when he 
dares to be, cringing when he feels that to be to his advantage. The 
illegitimate birth-rate is exceedingly high, sexual morality extremely 
shaky among the masses. Though the country people are sometimes 
pleasing in their simplicity, they quickly take on the unpleasant char- 
acteristics of the town dwellers when they come in contact with them, 
the most conspicuous being an unbridled insolence and a constant desire 
to annoy what may quite justly be called their betters. Part of this 
rudeness is due, no doubt, to the same cause as that of our laboring 
classes — a misguided attempt to prove their equality by scorning the 
amenities of social intercourse. A large percentage of it, however, 
is easily recognizable as native African barbarism, which increases by 
leaps and bounds as the suppression of former days weakens. If he is 
working for you or selling you something, the Jamaican can be softly 
courteous ; when he has no such reasons to repress his natural brutality 
his impudence is colossal. 

Even more than in the other British islands the masses of Jamaica 
have been " spoiled " by the war. Official reports credit the " B. W. I." 
regiments with " excelling in many acts of bravery " ; private informa- 
tion, even from some of the very men who dictated the official reports, 
has a different tenor. According to this they were useless in actual war- 
fare, not a man of them having died facing the enemy; even as labor 
battalions they were not worth their keep, and their conduct was such 
that both the French and the Italians protested against their being sta- 
tioned within reach of the civil population. Whichever of these reports 
is more trustworthy, there is no doubt that the hospitality shown these 
crude-minded blacks by a certain class of European women, and the 
fuss made over them upon their return, have given their rulers a prob- 
lem which will scarcely be solved during the present generation. 

Those who have spent their lives with the Jamaica negro — and to a 
certain extent he is typical of his race in all the British West Indies — 
agree in the main with the casual observer in the summing up of his 
characteristics. He is apt to take little pride in his work and to meet 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 409 

any criticism with " Cho, too much boderation ; can't do better." He 
sees little immorality in lying, and the man who expects truth from 
him according to the Anglo-Saxon standard will be grievously dis- 
appointed. Exactness in such matters as age, distance, names, and the 
like means nothing to him. His answer to a roadside inquiry is almost 
certain to be " not too far," and his age may change by ten years or 
more within the space of two sentences. He has the child's tendency 
to exaggeration and the building up of stories out of whole cloth, yet 
he can, scarcely plead the same excuse as the child, for his imagination 
is, at best, in a comatose state. Gratitude seems to have been com- 
pletely left out of his make-up. He dearly loves a bargain or a dispute ; 
the shop-keeper who has only one price arouses his hostility, and to 
appear in court either as plaintiff, defendant, or witness is one of his 
favorite forms of amusement. 

" Like the Irish," as one English Jamaican puts it, " he does himself 
more credit abroad than at home ; like them he is quite ready to emigrate 
and goes where the dollar calls, rather than aping the Englishman, who 
prefers a competency under the Union Jack to possible riches under 
another flag. If there is one thing he dislikes more than another," 
continues this authority, " it is sarcasm. He will stand any amount of 
'cussing,' but he keenly resents ridicule of any kind." What this critic 
does not add is that the sarcasm must be extremely broad if the average 
Jamaican is to recognize it as such. 

The lower classes are much given to " teefing " small articles, par- 
ticularly food. One might almost say that the chief curse of the island 
is " praedial larceny," as they still spell it in Jamaica, which means 
the stealing of growing crops. Newspapers, public reports, and pri- 
vate conversations contain constant references to this crime, prosecu- 
tions' for which nearly doubled in the year following the war. Many 
people no longer take the trouble to plant a crop of ground provisions, 
knowing that they will almost certainly be stolen by black loafers before 
the owners themselves can gather them. The main faults of the masses, 
— insolence, lying, illegitimacy, slackness in work, and thieving, — can 
scarcely be laid to drink ; for though Jamaica rum is famous and drunk- 
enness is on the increase, the women, who drink comparatively little, 
are as bad as the men in all these matters. 

Prisons and penal institutions are more in evidence in Jamaica than 
schools. While the latter are small and inconspicuous, the prison in 
Kingston is larger than Sing Sing, in Spanish Town there is another 
almost as large, and many more scattered throughout the island. The 



410 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

police, who are virtually all jet black, are poorly disciplined and much 
inclined to look misdemeanors, indecency, and even crime in the face 
without being moved to action. Pompously proud and inclined to inso- 
lence, also, they seldom fail to take advantage of their power over 
white men whenever it seems safe to do so. For there is little color-line 
in legal matters, and not only can whites be arrested by black officers, 
but they run a splendid chance of being tried by colored magistrates. 
The tendency to give the higher positions of responsibility in the police 
force to young Englishmen who have been decorated in the war or who 
have influential friends, yet who are more noted for their card playing 
and dancing than for ability or diligence in their new calling, has en- 
hanced a situation which the better class of Jamaicans view with alarm. 
There are one hundred and sixteen constabulary stations on the island 
and a force of a thousand regular constables, supplemented by almost 
as many district deputies, yet Jamaica is by no means so well policed as 
Porto Rico with its insular force of scarcely eight hundred. 

Even the friendly critic already quoted finds little to praise in the 
Jamaican except his cheerfulness, his loyalty, within limits, to those 
he serves, and his kindness to his own people, and he admits that the 
first of these qualities is often based on lack of ambition, " though it is 
nevertheless pleasant to live with." On the other hand, lack of equal 
opportunity is not without its effect on the negro character. Jamaica 
suffers from the same big estate and primogeniture troubles that hamper 
the masses in England. Slightly larger than Porto Rico, with five 
hundred thousand acres still held by the crown and with only half of 
the remainder under cultivation, the rest being wooded or " ruinate," 
as they call it in Jamaica, the island is principally in the hands of the 
whites. These strive to keep their estates intact and hold the negro in 
economic subjection. 

" Negroes who come back from Panama or Cuba with in some cases 
hundreds of pounds are seldom able to buy property," complained one of 
their sponsors. " It is only when the white man becomes very poor 
or the negro very rich that he can get a chunk of some big estate. The 
big owners too often pasture, rather than plant, their. best land and 
rent out the worst to the small peasants, at one pound an acre a year. 
If the rented land turns out to be too stony or otherwise useless, that 
is the peasant's loss and the owner's gain." One difficulty in bettering 
this condition, however, is the disinclination of the peasantry to pay 
regularly. On the whole, the planters show little generosity toward 
their laborers, thereby increasing the feeling between the two races. 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 411 

Though it is the most populous of the British West Indies, and the 
largest, unless one follows the English habit of including British Guiana, 
Jamaica is much less densely inhabited than Porto Rico, for it is natural 
that two islands so nearly alike in size, situation, and formation should 
constantly suggest comparison. When the British took Jamaica from 
the Spaniards in 1655, it had but 4200 inhabitants. Half a century 
later the population was more than two thirds negro. In 1842, four 
years after the abolition of slavery, the first shipload of indentured East 
Indians arrived, but this practice had almost ceased long before the 
Indian Government recently put a legal end to it. The Chinese coolies 
were tried for a time, but only in small numbers, and their descendants 
now confine themselves almost entirely to keeping what we would call 
" grocery stores." Both the Hindus and the Chinese, and for that 
matter the native whites, speak the slovenly Jamaican dialect, and there 
remains little of the Oriental garb and racial mixture so conspicuous in 
Trinidad. 

" On my arrival in Jamaica in 1795," says one of its governors, " I 
found a vast assembly of French emigrants of all ranks, qualities and 
colors, who had fled from the horrors of Santo Domingo " — by which, 
of course, he meant Haiti. Many Cubans came also when their island 
was under Spanish rule. But all these elements scarcely moderate 
Jamaica's distinctly African complexion. The visitor is apt to be 
astounded by the blackness of the great bulk of the population. The 
percentage of full blacks is in striking contrast to the mulatto majority 
in the French islands, where the mixture of races is not very sternly 
frowned upon, and still more so to the Spanish-American tropics, where 
micegenation is so common that nearly everyone is a " colored person." 
By her last census, which is nearly ten years old, Jamaica claims 831,383 
inhabitants, of whom 15,605 were white, 17,380 Hindus, and 2,1 1 1 
Chinese. The fact that she has barely two hundred to the square 
mile, as compared to twelve hundred in Barbados, is probably not 
without its bearing in the visible difference of energy between the two 
islands. 



The color-line in Jamaica, and it is more or less typical of that in 
all the British West Indies, falls somewhere between our own and 
the rather hazy one in vogue in the French islands. 

" I think the English individually," said a Jamaican sambo, that 
is a three fourths negro, who had worked on the Canal Zone, " like us 



412 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

black people still less than you Americans do ; but governmentally 
they treat us as equals, and you do not. Yet in some ways I prefer 
the American system. An Englishman says you are his equal, but 
you had better not act as if you were. The American says, * You 're 
a damned nigger and you know it,' and there is no hypocrisy in the 
matter." 

Strictly speaking, there are two color-lines in the British West In- 
dies. Unlike the United States, where " black " and " colored " are 
synonomous terms when applied to the negro race, there is a middle 
class of " colored people," as there are Eurasians in India, though 
actual membership in it implies a certain degree of education, culture, 
wealth, or influence. There are " colored " men who rank themselves 
and are ranked as negroes, working shoulder to shoulder with them in 
the fields ; there are others who sit side by side with their white 
brethren on the judicial bench and reach high rank in church, politics, 
medicine, law, and commerce. Color may almost be said to be no 
bar to promotion in official life, within limits. This middle set is ex- 
tremely assertive in its pride and, on the whole, is more disliked by 
the negroes than are the whites themselves. 

On a Jamaican train one day I fell into conversation with an octa- 
roon school-teacher. He was a forcible fellow who had evidently re- 
tained most of the qualities of his white ancestors. For some time I 
avoided any reference to the matter of human complexions, having no 
desire to offend him. Before long, however, he began to expatiate on 
the necessity of keeping the " niggers " in their place. 

" Hoho," said I to myself, " so you consider yourself a white 
man? " 

But he did not, for soon he began to explain the position of " us 
colored people." He often met fellow-teachers who were negroes, he 
said, but no negro ever entered his house, nor had he ever introduced 
his daughter to one of them. 

" The nigger," he went on, " always gets cocky when he is given 
either authority or encouragement. If I invite a negro to my house, 
the next thing I know he is proposing to my daughter and I have to kick 
him out, for in Jamaica the colored girl forever loses caste by marry- 
ing a black man. I would rather die than marry a negro woman, 
yet I would no sooner marry a white woman, because it would be hell 
in a few years. At the same time I know that a white man would 
have the same fear, if I were his guest. So I do not go to his house, 
even if I am asked, for he would be patronizing; and I do not invite 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 413 

a white man to my house because I know he would feel he was doing 
me a favor and an honor. 

" By the way," he asked later, " how would I get on in the United 
States? How did you know I am colored? My hair is pretty good." 
He smiled rather pathetically, passing a hand over it. 

It was straight as my own, and his skin was no darker than that of 
many a Spaniard. Yet, though he might not have been suspected in 
Paris, or possibly even in London, any American would have recog- 
nized him as a negro at a glance. I told him so frankly, and he ac- 
cepted the statement with consummate good sense. Thanks to the 
point of view he had expressed, there is little further mixture of races 
going on in the British West Indies, with the possible exception of 
Trinidad, and the three castes will probably remain intact and will each 
have to work out its own destiny. 

Included in the government of Jamaica are the Turks and Caicos 
Islands, which belong geographically to the Bahamas, as they once did 
officially. Transportation between them and the mother island is 
worse than uncertain, and they depend chiefly on their salt beds and 
emigration for their livelihood. There are a few small islands scat- 
tered close along the coast of Jamaica, but none of them is of any im- 
portance. 

The Jamaica Government Railway is one of the oldest in the world, 
having been first opened to traffic in 1845. It i s almost two hundred 
miles long, running diagonally across the island from Kingston to 
Montego Bay, and north and eastward to Port Antonio, with two 
small branches. The fares are high, being about seven cents a mile 
first-class and half as much for second. The latter is really third-class 
in all but name, with hard wooden benches and scanty accommoda- 
tions, and carries virtually all the traveling population. In it one will 
find the poorer whites, such as ministers with their thin, hungry-look- 
ing wives, and other poverty-stricken mortals, contrasting strongly 
with the " husky," broad-shouldered negroes with their velvety black 
skins, beautiful as mere types of the animal kingdom. Here and there, 
perhaps, sits a young Chinaman, inscrutable, seeing and thinking of 
it all, no doubt, yet never giving a hint of his thoughts, a Celestial still 
though born on the island. Then there is a scattering of all grades of 
yellow, some of them so much so that they try to smile one into the 
belief that they are white. In a corner of one of these coaches is a 
negro in a wire cage, the railway post-office. First-class consists of 
a little eight-seat compartment in the end of one, or at most two, 



4 i4 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

coaches, stiff-backed, hot, dusty, commonly filled with tobacco-smoke 
and scarcely a fit place for a white woman. Occasionally it is crowded 
with Chinese shopkeepers and the bundles of wares they would not 
find room for in the other class, but more often it, too, is distinctly 
African in tinge. For like the island, the " J. G. R." is overwhelmingly 
negro. All the trainmen are full blacks, as are virtually all the pas- 
sengers. The " trainboy " is a haughty negro woman in near-silk 
garb, enormous earrings, and a white, nurse-like cap, who sells chiefly 
beer and never calls out her wares. In the island dialect a local train 
is a " walkin' train," and all Jamaican trains fall into this category, as 
do all those in the West Indies except in Cuba and, to a slight degree, 
Trinidad. There are no train manners. In a Spanish country if you 
put so much as a cane in a seat your possession of it is assured and 
respected to the end of the journey. Put all your baggage, and your 
coat and hat in addition, into a Jamaican train-seat and you will prob- 
ably come back to find your possessions tossed on the floor and some 
impudent black wench occupying your place. Why the " J. G. R." is 
so ungodly as to run Sunday trains on its Port Antonio branch, I do 
not know. They are about the only things that do move in the British 
West Indies on the Sabbath. 

From Kingston the train jolts away through the swirling dust 
across a flat, Arizona-like plain studded with cactus, though moder- 
ately green. Soon come broad stretches of banana fields, bananas 
planted in endless rows down which one can look as through arch- 
ways, many of the plants heavy with their bunches nearing maturity, 
others showing little more than the big purple flower shaped like a 
swollen, unhusked ear of corn, along the stem of which a miniature 
bunch is just starting. Between these are other fields, with trees 
girdled and blackened where some forest is being killed to make way 
for more bananas. Negro women with oval market baskets on their 
heads tramp energetically along the white highway ; now and then 
the refined features of a Hindu break the monotony of brutal negro 
faces, though he has lost his distinctive garb. Then comes the prison 
farm of St. Catherine's Parish, with its green gardens, its irrigation 
ditches filled with clear water, and its horde of prison laborers. But 
the train is already coming to a screeching halt in the former capital 
of the island, twelve miles from Kingston. 

As in Trinidad the Spaniards preferred an inland site for their 
principal city, and this Villa de la Vega was founded by Columbus's 
son Diego after they had abandoned their first capital of Sevilla Nueva 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 415 

on the north coast. The English, being a maritime people before all 
else, first set up their government in Port Royal, but even they could 
not endure a capital that had sunk beneath the sea, and returned to the 
old Spanish headquarters. This had come to be called St. Jago de la 
Vega, a name still to be found on ancient mile-posts along the roads 
of the vicinity, but that was too much of an effort for the thick negro 
tongues and the place was rechristened Spanish Town. It remained 
the capital of the island until 1870, and still retains the records' of- 
fice. Set in a flat plain half covered with bushy trees, it is but a very 
trifle cooler and not much more pleasant than Kingston. There are 
still many Spanish names and features in Spanish Town, but only 
one family which speaks that language, and very few Catholics. An 
old red brick cathedral recently restored is said to be the oldest in the 
British colonies, Anglican now, of course, and open only during serv- 
ices. Spanish Town has scarcely ten thousand inhabitants, though it 
disputes with Montego Bay and Port Antonio the second place among 
towns of the island. In its center is still a kind of Spanish plaza, with 
only its grass and trees left, and surrounded by old yellow brick gov- 
ernment buildings — all of which, one learns with surprise, were built 
by the English. Under the portico of one of these is a statue of Rod- 
ney, who raised the Union Jack over the French in the West Indies, 
dressed in that glorified undershirt or incomplete Roman toga worn 
no doubt by all British admirals in those heated days. The old capital 
has an open market which is a trifle better dressed, though more bestial 
and insolent than those of Haiti, and its only hotel is a negro joint over- 
run with plate-licking cats and setting hens, which masquerades under 
the name of " Marble Hall." 

Though it was for a century and a half under Spanish rule, Jamaica 
shows few signs of Iberian influence, except in its geographical names. 
Some of these remain pure, but the majority of them have been cor- 
rupted by the thick-tongued negroes into something only faintly re- 
sembling the original. Thus Managua has become Moneague, Agua 
Alta is now Wag Water, a place once noted for its manteca, or lard, is 
Montego Bay, and Boca del Agua has adopted the alias of Bog Walk. 
When England wrested Jamaica from Spain the property which the 
Spaniards could not take with them they largely destroyed, so that 
no real Spanish building has remained intact. Unlike Trinidad the 
Spanish tongue is almost never heard in Jamaica. 

The train continues across the flat plain, everywhere thinly covered 
with big bushy trees. Indeed one of the stations is called Bushy 



4 i6 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Park, where an old brick aqueduct which looks Spanish, though it 
probably is not, still carries water across the cane-fields. Muscular 
negro youths in rags, either without the possibility or the desire to earn 
better garments, swarm about the stations and into the cars, pouncing 
upon the luggage of any traveler who shows the slightest sign of de- 
scending. An hour and a half from Kingston, beyond the station for 
Old Harbour, the land begins slowly and gradually to rise, and one is 
soon overlooking a vast tree-bushy rather than forested country. 
Broad fields of henequcn, jute sisal, or rope-cactus, as you choose to 
call it, are planted in rows on rather arid looking ground completely 
covered with high brown grass. The first suggestion of beauty in the 
landscape appears near May Pen. A " pen " in the Jamaica dialect 
means a grassy field or a pasture, and " pen keeping " is the local term 
for breeding and raising cattle. Here and there the inevitable old 
square brick chimneys of sugarmills dot the ever descending plain, 
which at length begins to be hidden by low foothills. Sapling-like for- 
ests spring up along the way, and the logwood that grows in scat- 
tered quantities all over the island lies piled at the railway stations, 
the outer layer of wood roughly hacked away, leaving only the red- 
dish heart. Schooners carry north many cargoes of these crooked 
logs and the still more awkward stumps, while several mills on the 
island turn it into an extract that is shipped in barrels to color our 
garments dark-blue or black. Jamaica produces also a certain amount 
of fustic, a smooth, straight tree which gives a khaki color. 

Soon the soil, or " sile," as they call it in Jamaica, turns reddish 
and clearings and habitations become rare. By this time we were the 
only white persons on the train and shortly after that the only pas- 
sengers in the first-class coach. A larger engine took us in tow and 
we climbed 865 feet in the next six miles. Dense, almost unpopulated 
forests, like some sections of eastern Cuba, covered the ever more 
rugged landscape; but if the scenery flanking Jamaica's railway is more 
striking than that visible from the trains in Porto Rico, it is because 
it passes through rather than around the island, for on the whole our 
own West Indian colony is more beautiful. The train continues to 
climb until it attains an altitude of 1680 feet at Green Vale, then de- 
scends steadily past several villages of no great importance, through 
numerous " tubes," as Jamaicans call a tunnel, now and then past long 
stretches of bananas, otherwise through almost a wilderness broken 
only by tiny corn or cane-fields about the rare negro shacks. At Cata- 
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AFRICAN JAMAICA 417 

length into a square mile of sugar-cane beyond which lies Montego Bay- 
on the northern coast. 

But we had long since left it, to drive by " buggy " — our American 
term for a country carriage has somehow become acclimated in Jamaica 
— into the Manchester hills. The trip from Kingston to Mandeville, 
2200 feet above the sea, is like one from down-town New York to 
the Berkshires in July. Indeed the visitor to Manchester Parish 
might almost fancy himself in Connecticut, in spite of the prevalence 
of negroes. The gray stone fences, with big horses ankle-deep in the 
grassy pastures behind them, the rolling stretches of corn, the very 
birds bear out the illusion. Even the clumps of bamboo seem to be 
growing on Connecticut hillsides ; the orchids and treeferns contrast 
strangely with a weather and landscape of the temperate zone; Mande- 
ville itself, long famous as a health resort for the residents of the 
sweltering coast lands, has that air of calm repose of some old New 
England village. 

Carriage driving has more nearly survived modern invention in 
Jamaica than in any other of the West Indies, perhaps for the double 
reason of the high price of " gas " and the existence of good horses. 
The Jamaican horses are famed throughout the Caribbean for their 
size and endurance — also for their hard gait as riding animals. They 
are not handsome, being usually lank and goose-rumped, but they are 
so docile they may sometimes be driven without being broken and they 
retain the size of their English ancestors instead of degenerating into 
the runts of most tropical America, and they are unusually free from 
disease. Breeders claim that they remain so sound in spite of the 
enervating climate largely because of the limestone formation of the 
island and the recuperative effects of its high altitudes. At any rate 
there are few places where a negro-driven buggy and pair cannot be 
had on short notice. Many splendid draft mules are also bred on the 
island. 

I preferred, however, to set out on foot from Mandeville for a jaunt 
diagonally across the island. Walking is not a favorite recreation 
among either the white or the " colored " castes, though there is no 
good reason other than inertia why it should not be in the temperate 
highlands. Jamaica has more than two thousand miles of good roads, 
far outdoing those of Porto Rico in extent, though they are narrower 
and sometimes poorly kept, partly because many of them are parochial 
roads, unknown in the neighboring island. " Fingerboards " point 



418 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the way everywhere. The high altitudes of Manchester, as of several 
other parishes, lack only the shade-grown tobacco fields and the varie- 
gated tints of intensive cultivation to rival in beauty our own West 
Indian colony. Birds are always singing, scattered little white houses 
speckle the immense green hillsides, the road banks are often carpeted 
with " wandering Jew " enough to make the fortune of an American 
florist, or they are hung with tapestries of what look like daisies, while 
other flowers bloom on every hand. In a climate pleasant even at noon- 
day one would scarcely recognize the Berkshire landscape as tropical 
but for a banana, a giant fern, or a palm tree here and there in the 
foreground. 

Ltttle stone and brick coffee floors, called " barbecues " in Jamaica, 
frequently flank the roadway. Manchester parish grows much cof- 
fee, though it rarely reaches the American market, for England con- 
sumes all the island produces. Here the bushes are usually unshaded, 
protecting trees being unnecessary, if not harmful, at such an altitude. 
Instead of the little toy donkey-carts of Barbados there are big rat-, 
tling mule wagons. Donkeys are sometimes ridden, occasionally used 
as pack-animals. The peasants have little of the insolence of the 
towns, but greet the traveler with a kind of military salute and a 
gentle " Good day, sah." Most of them wear caps, as in Barbados, 
though the similar head-gear of the women in that island is here re- 
placed by bandannas, usually red and never topped off with a hat as 
in Haiti. The men, and many of the women, smoke home-made pipes 
with long curved stems, buying their tobacco in long coils called " jack- 
ass rope," which the war forced to the painful price of a shilling a 
yard, though it was once but two pence. Fully developed girls of 
twelve eye the passer-by with crudely coquettish airs. Information 
as to distance is given in " chains " if at all, the customary answer 
being a non-committal " not too far, sah." The great bulk of the coun- 
try population is jet black, though in the towns there are all grades of 
yellow, from the impudent slight-cast down to mulattoes. 

It was in the cabin of one of the latter that I took shelter from the 
afternoon shower, in a region rejoicing in the name of Split Virgin. 
He was perhaps two thirds Irish and one third negro, but always re- 
ferred to his black neighbors as " niggers." On the walls of his un- 
painted board parlor hung framed chromo portraits of his white an- 
cestors. The inevitable topic of conversation of course was the high 
cost of living — where can one escape it? A "head" of sugar had 
advanced from a " giK " (three farthings) to six pence; corn cost 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 419 

more than the chickens to which it was fed increased in worth; wild 
nuts were more expensive than the flesh they added to his hogs. 
Calico, put in his wife, all cloth in fact, was getting impossible. Soon 
they would have to go naked — which reminded me that one never 
sees naked children in Jamaica, unlike most of the Caribbean islands. 
A man could not even grow his own food any more ; three fourths of 
his yam holes were robbed at night by the thieving " niggers." The 
war and the travel and experience that went with it had debauched 
even the better class of them, until they were slothful, proud, insolent, 
and wasteful. 

I stopped that night in a mulatto house that took in lodgers, the only 
point of interest being the dug-out log that served as bath-tub. The 
invariable Jamaican question in making new acquaintances is " Please, 
sah, who you is ; y'u' name, please sah ? " Once they know your name 
they seem to feel that everything is all right. But you must have a 
name, with a mister in front of it. You never say your name is 
Smith. Your name is Mr. Smith. I tremble to think what might 
befall a stranger in rural Jamaica who did not happen to have a name, 
and a mister to prefix to it. 

Over the top of the island range at Coleyville, with its wireless sta- 
tion, I passed a Jamaica sugarmill with a daily capacity of one gross 
" heads." It consisted of two upright wooden rollers turned by a 
donkey, an oval iron kettle set into the top of a mud furnace, and a 
score of little tin cups in which are hardened the one-pound dark- 
brown lumps of crude sugar that are called " heads " and which form 
a principal article of diet among the country people. Long-tailed 
hummingbirds shimmered among the flowers at the roadside. Broad 
green vistas of banana plants, their broad leaves whipped to ribbons 
by the trade wind, filled many a valley, sometimes climbing part way 
up the surrounding slopes. Road gangs, usually of two men, were 
frequent; negro women young and old, sometimes in long groups, 
sometimes quite alone, were to be found in every mile, sitting on stone 
piles and wielding their hammers. They are paid a shilling a " box " 
for breaking up the stones, which they must hunt for in the fields and 
carry to the roadside, earning an average, if they told the truth, of nine 
pence a day. It was planting time for ginger, which grows in little 
patches on the steep red hillsides. The plant, which is pulled in Feb- 
ruary or March, somewhat resembles a currant-bush and only the root 
is valuable, the bushes being broken up and used in the following May 
or June as seed. With good luck a Jamaica peasant may get 2000 



420 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

pounds of cured ginger to the acre. Wages varied in this region from 
" one and six " to " two and six," one of the workmen told me, adding 
regretfully " de cultivators in de hills can't afford de dollar" (four 
shillings) " dat am payin' now de sugar estates." Shingle and wood 
houses were the rule here, and they were better than the rural hovels 
of Porto Rico, perhaps because the material is more plentiful. 

Each morning I met flocks of black children, carrying their slates 
and their few books on their heads, hurrying to school, usually in the 
church, from which a chorus of hymns invariably arose as soon as the 
pupils were gathered. In the early days the government of Jamaica 
did little toward educating the populace, but left it to the denomina- 
tional schools. Only a few years ago was the penny a week, still re- 
quired of pupils in most of the British West Indies, abolished, and 
though there are public schools now in every parish, the Moravians, 
Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, the Church of Scotland, the Bap- 
tists, the Wesleyans, and the Church of Jamaica get government sub- 
sidies for educational purposes. England's school record in Jamaica 
is as low as our own in Porto Rico. Slightly more than half the 
children of school age are enrolled, and the attendance of these is fit- 
ful. There is compulsory attendance only in Kingston and two or 
three other towns. Only three out of every hundred pupils reach 
the sixth grade, and in all the island fewer than three thousand con- 
tinue in school after the age of fourteen. School inspectors play an 
important part in the social life, each having about seventy schools 
in his charge, which he must visit twice a year. The Jamaica govern- 
ment has often been warned against the danger of teaching her democ- 
racy to read unless she also taught it to think, but the warning has 
never been taken very seriously. 

The country churches of Jamaica are small and unimposing com- 
pared with those of Barbados, though they are more numerous and 
often conspicuous in their prominent settings on the green hillsides. 
The sects seem to run in streaks. In this ginger region — most fit- 
tingly perhaps — the Church of Scotland holds sway, the ministers 
receiving their stipends and their instructions from the land of 
heather. Farther on the Baptists prevailed, and every little negro 
urchin I questioned announced himself a faithful follower of that 
sect. On a high hilltop they had built a stone church as high as the 
eaves, then suddenly abandoned it, apparently because it had occurred 
to them that there was no water available at that height. The 
Jamaicans are much given to religious expression. It is nothing rare 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 421 

to hear them " callin' on de Lawd " as they tramp along the roads, and 
their antics sometimes reach the height of religious insanity. Such 
seemed to be the case of a ragged old woman I passed during my sec- 
ond day's tramp, or else she was pretending the power of prophecy for 
the benefit of the score of wide-eyed negroes squatting on the ground 
about her as she marched back and forth preaching with all the in- 
flections of a negro minister and ending each exhortation with a 
" Bless de Lawd, Oh, mah soul ! " which echoed back from the neigh- 
boring hills. Tombstones are less numerous in Jamaican churchyards 
than one would expect, perhaps because of the custom of burying peo- 
ple on their own property. One often comes upon a little cluster of 
graves in a lonely bit of woods, or beside a country hut, some of them 
dating from the slave days. Most of them are covered by a mound 
of stone and cement, without crosses or other upright monument, 
some are large vaults, all are well kept and usually freshly whitewashed. 
Strangely enough the negroes do not seem to be in any way supersti- 
tious about them. 

Annotto and pimento are two important products of the Jamaican 
hills that are sure to draw the pedestrian's attention. The former 
is a reddish berry in a kind of chestnut-burr pod, which grows on a 
spreading bush and, being boiled, gives an oily extract that is used as 
a dye. Pimento is what we know as allspice, and is the only Jamaican 
export indigenous to the island. The tree grows some thirty feet high 
and its greenish-gray bark and glossy green leaves cause it to stand 
out conspicuously from the surrounding forest. When crushed in the 
hand the leaves emit a strong aromatic odor, but they have no commer- 
cial value. The berry, of the size of a currant, grows in clusters, is 
glossy black when ripe and very pleasant to the taste. But it must 
be gathered before that, and has then a peppery, astringent quality. 
They are picked by sending a small boy up the tree to break off the 
ends of all the branches he can reach and throw them to the ground, 
where the berries are gathered by women and children and carried 
to the " barbecues," where they are dried like coffee. 

Irish potatoes can be grown in the highlands of Jamaica; there are 
some nutmegs ; the oranges are green in color and of poor quality ; 
there are sapotes (which are here called naseberries, a corruption of 
the West Indian Spanish nispero), grapefruit, shadducks (a pear- 
shaped grapefruit with a reddish pulp), the chocho, and a dozen other 
purely tropical fruits and vegetables. But with the single exception 
of the pimento all these products have been imported, though many of 



422 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

them have fervently adopted their new home. In 1793, for instance, 
when a famine was ravaging the island, William Bligh brought the 
breadfruit tree from the South Seas, and to-day it is as familiar a 
sight as African faces. 

A furzy, almost treeless, red soil region surrounded me on my 
second afternoon. I was flanking the famous cockpit country, made 
up of numerous basins in close proximity and densely wooded from 
top to bottom, wilder forms of what are known in Minnesota as 
" sink-holes." In these the Maroons took refuge in their wars with 
the English. The Maroons (an abbreviation of cimaroon,' said to 
be derived from the Spanish cima, or mountain top) were originally 
slaves of the Spanish, who took to the cockpit country after England 
captured Jamaica, where they were joined from time to time by runa- 
way slaves of the newcomers. England won her title to the island 
almost without a struggle, but it took two regiments to keep the 
Maroons from recapturing it. For nearly two hundred years they 
lived in wild freedom in the mountain recesses, frequently descend- 
ing to harry the lowlands and carry off the cattle. The government 
at length entered into a treaty with them, granting them 2500 acres of 
land, and getting in turn their assistance in quelling uprisings of the 
slaves or repelling foreign invasion. They were a bold, hardy lot of 
men, holding the servile peasant population in great contempt, know- 
ing every inch of the hills and forests, and were great hunters, either 
of human or four-footed game. In warfare they dressed themselves 
in green leaves which caused them to blend invisibly into the landscape. 
It has always been the policy of the Government to keep the Maroons 
at odds with the rest of the population, England's familiar old scheme 
for dominion, like the accentuation of caste lines in India. To-day, 
though there are several so-called Maroon towns in the cockpit coun- 
try and another in the northeastern parish, there are said to be almost 
no " pure blooded " Maroons left. They still exist in name, however, 
and have their own chiefs, churches, and schools, and once a year 
they are paid an official visit by the custos of the parish, when they 
" dress up in leaves and similar rubbish and go through a lot of child- 
ish hocuspocus." In theory at least they are more independent than 
the other negroes — which is strong language indeed — but though 
every little while some black countryman bullies his neighbors by 
claiming to be a Maroon, there is nothing by which to distinguish the 






AFRICAN JAMAICA 423 

present decendants of the war-like slaves from those whose ancestors 
peacefully awaited emancipation. 

Wayside shops are somewhat less numerous in Jamaica than in 
Barbados, and it is significant of a larger American influence here that 
they are called stores. The best of them, virtually all the provision 
sTiops in fact, are kept by Chinamen, unknown in " Little England." 

i Even in the most remote corners of the mountainous interior one 
comes upon Celestials plying their chosen trade, most of them of the 
younger generation, born in Jamaica and speaking the same slovenly 
tongue as their negro clients, yet retaining all their native attributes, 

j sphinx-like, taciturn, unflaggingly diligent, apparently wholly devoid 
of curiosity, only rarely succumbing to the native influence to the ex- 
tent of mumbling an indifferent "Where y'u go?" or "What y'u 
name?" In striking contrast to Barbados, too, are the stocks of im- 
ported canned and salt fish, even in stores on the edge of the sea. Every 
scattered collection of huts has its post office, always bearing the blue 

: sign " Quinine for Sale." Single pills of the febrifuge are sold in 
printed envelopes at a farthing each, though there are few coins of that 
size in circulation, and he who buys a penny-worth gets his four pills 
in as many separate envelopes. The favorite native occupation seems 
to be the patching of shoes. It is a rare mile that does not have at 

I least one " shoemaker " seated in the door of his tiny shanty or single 
room, striving to make both ends meet with a few scraps of leather and 
a handful of nails. Almost the only native manufacture, however, 
is the weaving of " jippi jappa " hats, a very coarse, poor imitation of 
the Panama, though the country people make all shapes and sizes of 
baskets. 

The language of Jamaica is at best curious ; that spoken in the hills 
seems almost a foreign dialect, and the stranger must listen attentively 
and usually have phrases repeated before he understands them. He 
is unlikely to catch more than the general drift of a conversation be- 
tween the natives. Yet few African words remain ; what seem such 
to the stranger turn out upon inquiry to be mutilated forms of Eng- 
lish. " No, please " and " Oh, yes, please, sah " are the habitual nega- 
tive and affirmative of the. rural districts when addressing white per- 
sons. Now and then the greeting of the older people is " Good mawnin', 
dear massa," or " I tell you good evenin', mistress." It is always " I 
could n't tell you," never " I don't know." A white baby is a " bukra 
pickney" to the country people; smile at any of their childish antics 



424 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

and they are flattered into confiding to one another " De bukra him 
laugh." African languages consist largely of gesture. With the 
learning of English from the stolid Anglo-Saxon this has in 
great measure disappeared. It is much more prevalent in the country i 
than in the towns, and much more marked when they are talking 
to one another than when addressing a white man. The negro- 
English of the masses is no more intelligible to the newcomer than *$ 
real English is to the rural population, and most planters save 
themselves time and trouble by addressing their laborers in 
their own dialect. The Jamaican negro is much given to talking 
things over with himself, his brain evidently refusing to work silently, 
and it is the rule rather than the exception to hear those one meets $ 
along the roads engaged in a soliloquy. In slavery days queer terms 
were used for money and they are still heard in the rural districts ; 
and in town markets. I found a Chinaman spending his spare time 
between customers in wrapping up tiny packages of sugar and asked 
him if they were a penny-worth, which seemed small enough indeed 
at present prices. No, they are sold at a " gill," or three farthings. 
Two " gills," or three " ha'p'nnies," is a " quattie." A shilling used 
to be a " macaroni," three pence was for some reason called " fip- 
pence," and to this day one occasionally hears the equivalent of thirty 
West Indian cents referred to as "a mac an' fippence." The ejacu- 
latory " I mean to say " is as frequent in the speech of even the 
peasants as it is in England. 

• What may be called proverbs for lack of a more exact name are 
numerous among the masses of Jamaica. Let me quote a few, leav- 
ing the reader to catch what meaning he can out of them: 

" Better fe water trow 'way dan gourd fe bruck." 
" Black man tief , him tief half a bit ; bukra tief , him tief whole a 
estate." 

" Cock crow 'trongest 'pon him own dung'll." 

" Cedar board laugh after dead man." 

" Don' cry oveh milk wha' trow 'way a'ready." 

" Dog hab too much owner him sleep widout supper." 

" Ebery dog tink himself lion in him massa yard." 

" Ebery John Crow tink him pickney white." 

" Ebery man know where him house a leak." 

" Follow fashin mek monkey cut him tail," 

" Get a quattie better dan a kick." 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 425 

" Larn te dance a home befo' y'u go outside." 
" Man no done grow mus'n laugh afteh short man." 
" Man get in trouble pickney breeches fit he." 
" Runnin' 'bout too much de ruin ob woman an' fowl." 
" Same ting sweet mout' hu't belly." 
" Sometime high standin' collar stan' top a empty belly." 
" Too much cousin broke shop." 

' When y'u hab bad husban' don' mek y'u sweethea't ca' y'u half 
way." 

" Man run too fast run two time." 

" Ebery jackass tink him pickney a race horse." 

Folk lore shows evidence of English and African mixture. Here 
is a story as it was told by our son's Jamaican nursemaid, without the 
inimitable pronunciation : 

" One day a gentleman and lady have two girl. And they sent them 
out to look for them granny. When them got in the thick wood and 
them meet with a orangootang. The orangootang axed them where 
are them going to. ' I am going to look for my granny.' And said, 
' Here is my granny.' And them said, ' No, you is not my granny. 
My granny got a mark right on her mout'.' And he went in the thick 
wood took a knife scrape off his mout' and come out and said, ' Here is 
your granny now.' And he took dem and carry dem in his house and 
just half cook de food dat carry for dem granny. And when night 
come him eat off de middle of de biggest one and lef only de hand and 
de head and de feet. And de little one said, ' Granny, let I go outside.' 
And he said go and de smallest one run home and can't talk till three 
days. And de father get twelve men and gone look for de orangoo- 
tang. And when he going six mont' he catch de orangootang and put 
him into de cage and when six mont' come he throw kerosene oil on 
him and light him a fire." 

Tenses mean nothing to the uneducated Jamaican, and the subjective 
and objective pronouns are more likely to be reversed than not. Be- 
tween the plural and singular of either verb or noun he shows an en- 
gaging impartiality, while the double negative is to him a form of em- 
phasis. 

Beyond Ulster Spring, a scattered town in a kind of cockpit so 
full of mist in the early morning as to seem a lake, my road dropped 
rapidly down a beautiful narrow valley, the high, ragged hills on both 
sides tree-clothed in all but the barest white sheer spots. Little wooden 



426 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

houses were pitched on wooded knolls and jutting places that seemed 
almost inaccessible. Here and there the ancient stone road-parapet 
had fallen away, giving splendid opportunities for far swifter descent 
on a dark night. Through the canyon echoed the voice of a negro 
woman, singing hymns as she walked. Birds sang continually; from 
the inaccessible little houses came the occasional bleating of goats. 
Dry River Lake, evidently in the bottom of a prehistoric crater, shim- 
mered far below me, surrounded by the densest vegetation, and utter 
silence. Jamaica has many rivers that disappear and reappear at ran- 
dom throughout their course. Negro men on their way to work on the 
jungled hillsides carried their machetes in one hand and a smouldering 
block of wood in the other, to smoke out the mosquitos. Some bore 
in addition a blackened five-gallon oil tin of water on their heads. 
The day did not grow unpleasantly warm until I had passed Sawyer's 
Market and entered a long fertile plain, completely uncultivated, al- 
most uninhabited, studded with great clumps of bamboo. Dolphin Head, 
the highest peak in western Jamaica, peered above the landscape to the 
left. Then bit by bit the negroes grew numerous and impudent again, 
and I knew that the sugar-bearing coastlands were at hand. 

Negroes so black and ox-like that they seemed scarcely human 
plodded past, never giving greeting as in the hills, though sometimes 
shouting an obscene jest. Children ran at sight of me, as those of 
Italy, for instance, do at sight of a negro. Ragged old women were 
hoeing cane in the fields. They earned five shillings a week ; the strong- 
est men three a day, at " task-work," laboring from Monday to Fri- 
day. Here and there was an old-fashioned rum-mill, recognisable by 
its stench as well as by its old brick chimney and the heaps of rotting 
cane-pulp about it. The cane-carts were hauled by three or four pairs 
of oxen, a dozen men shrieking about them to urge them up the slopes 
of the soft fields. Like most of those in Jamaica they were crosses 
between English and East Indian cattle, particularly the Mysore breed. 
Though inferior from the butcher's point of view, these cross-breeds 
are noted for their quickness and endufance under the yoke, and they 
have a black, sun-resistant skin even when outwardly light-colored 
or white. Once I passed a ruined old windmill tower, capped with 
ivy, but they are rare in Jamaica. The thick, hot air hung motionless 
after the afternoon shower. Rocky, bush-grown hills intruded again 
where one expected flat, fertile coastlands, sugar-cane died out once 
more, and with it the negroes. 

Then suddenly the Caribbean appeared through a break in the hills, 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 427 

so high and dark-blue that it seemed at first a new mountain range, 
and on the edge of it I caught a glimpse of Falmouth, not to be seen 
again until I was treading its very streets. Many old stone ruins, 
especially the foundations and steps of what had evidently been big 
plantation houses, peered forth from the bush. There were other signs 
that large estates had once flourished where all was not " ruinate." 
Dreary, silent, dismal, swarming with mosquitoes, the last few miles 
led through an unbroken mangrove swamp. Myriads of landcrabs 
of all sizes and colors, some huge as small turtles, others no larger 
than flies, with green, red, cream-colored, and multi-colored backs, 
scuttled into their holes as I passed. Falmouth had little to recom- 
mend it, either as a place of abode or of sojourn. Sweltering even at 
midnight, its streets impudent with lounging negroes, it recalled by 
contrast the cool and simple little villages in the hills. I found lodg- 
ing in a room strewn with the greasy paraphernalia of a negro dentist 
and which had not known the luxury of a broom or a dust-cloth in 
weeks, though the mulatto house-owner complained that she " can't get 
no work to do." A Salvation Army street meeting which erupted a 
few doors away was the nearest replica of a Central African tomtom 
dance, with clothes on and smeared with a thin English veneer, that 
it has ever been my luck to behold in an ostensibly civilized coun- 
try. 

I had not intended to walk the twenty-two miles along the coast 
from Falmouth to Montego Bay, but as the mail bus left at three in 
the morning and private automobiles demanded three shillings a mile, 
I changed my plans. Groups of ragged negro women came down out 
of the hills singing, their dinner in a rag or a pail on their heads, and 
fell to work in newly cleared cane-fields. Pedestrians were constantly 
beating off the mosquitoes with leafy branches. Once there had been 
big stone houses here also, now there were only miserable negro shacks 
scattered among the cocoanut groves. The sea breeze was nearly al- 
ways cut off by these or mangrove jungles. The only noise except 
occasional shrieking negroes was the cry of mourning doves and the 
equally mournful " sough " of the slow breakers on the reefs far out 
from shore. Fishermen were rare. Now and then the swamps dis- 
appeared and the road plodded endlessly onward at the very edge of 
the unruffled inner lagoons. I passed only one shop on the journey, 
kept of course by a Jamaica-born Chinaman. Drinking water was not 
to be had ; the June sun beat down like a red-hot ingot ; the incredibly 
stupid watchmen, most of whom were females, could not be induced 



428 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

to sell a single one of the green cocanuts under their charge. I adopted 
the Jamaican custom of praedial larceny and, picking a plump green 
nut now and then from the low young trees, jabbed a hole in it on a 
sharp fencepost and quenched a raging thirst that returned again within 
a half mile. Noisome carrion crows, with red heads instead of black, 
unlike those of Trinidad, and called " johncrow " by the natives, moved 
lazily aside as I advanced. 

Midway between the two towns I passed a three-story mansion set 
somewhat back from the sea on what was once one of the finest estates 
in Jamaica. To-day it is closed and abandoned, yet needs no watchman, 
for the negroes are convinced that it is haunted. Rose Hall it is called, 
and its story has long been familiar throughout Jamaica. Here, runs 
the yarn, lived a pretty Mrs. Palmer, who was so eccentric that she 
caused the house to be built according to the divisions of time, — 365 
windows, 52 doors, 24 rooms, 12 of this, 7 of that, and so on. But 
eccentricity seems to have been the least of her faults, for in this very 
house, the tale goes on, she killed four husbands and was on the point 
of sending the fifth to join them when he turned the tables. 

At length the featureless road swung inland along the edge of an 
immense bay, across which stood forth the wooded hills of Hanover 
parish. Its waters were glass-smooth, but the seawall smashed for long 
distances recalled that the Caribbean does not always lie so peaceful and 
enticing. Cottages with bathing-suits hung over the veranda rails 
began to appear, then white men, of whom I had seen but one in three 
days, and he with a negro wife. Montego Bay aspires to be a tourists' 
winter paradise, but unfortunately the town lies around behind a hill 
that cuts off that life-saving trade wind which Jamaicans call " the doc- 
tor " and in its place comes only the fitful land breeze known as " the 
undertaker." Then, too, it is short of water. Most of Jamaica is, for 
unlike Barbados, which has not a tithe as many sources of supply, the 
island depends chiefly on what it can catch from the rains. The 
result is frequently to deprive the perspiring visitor of his bath. Tour- 
ist literature would have us believe that " the band of the Montego Bay 
Citizens' Association performs in the Parade" — most Jamaican towns 
have a dusty central square known by that name — " in the evenings, 
and greatly adds to the pleasure of the visitor." " Perform " it does 
indeed, and none can deny that it adds to the risibility of nations ; but 
let no music lover be misled by this particular abuse of the maltreated 
word " pleasure." 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 429 

Of the many other beauties of Jamaica space precludes anything 
more than brief mention. There are the cane-fields of Westmoreland 
parish, for instance, the tobacco growing hills of St. Elizabeth, the 
journey up the gorge to Bog Walk, St. Ann's parish with its newly 
born lake of Moneague, its many pimento trees, its beguiling Fern 
Gully, where are to be found innumerable species of the plants that give 
the ravine its name, from the maidenhair to the treefern, known locally 
as the " rattadrum." Here, too, are Roaring River Falls and the scene 
of Columbus' longest residence in the West Indies, for he lay a twelve- 
month with his worm-eaten vessels in what is now called Dry Harbor. 

But it would never do to leave Jamaica without getting a " close-up " 
of her banana industry, and to do this to best advantage one should 
go to Port Antonio. Above Bog Walk on the way there is Natural 
Bridge, where the river cuts a great archway through the rocky hills, 
the highway crossing it far above, recalling famous Rumichaca on the 
boundary of Colombia and Ecuador, to say nothing of one of our own 
scenic beauties. Here is a splendid place to end a Sunday stroll, for 
there is a magnificent bath awaiting one amid the boulders over which 
the river pours with a constant subway roar and, if one can elude the 
gaping negroes who are otherwise sure to follow, no other observers 
than the hundreds of little swallows always flitting in and out of their 
nests in the rock cliffs. Then when the sun has lost its youthful ardor 
one may climb again to the village and catch the afternoon train over 
the mountains to the north coast. The region about Highgate almost 
rivals the beauty of Porto Rico. Cacao, cocoanuts, clumps of bamboo, 
the spreading breadfruit-trees, whole valleys full of bananas, some of 
which climb far up the surrounding slopes, decorate the rugged land- 
scape. One looks almost in vain, however, as in all Jamaica, for the 
queen of tropical vegetation, the royal — or, as the English unimagina- 
tively call it, the cabbage-palm. Then the train descends quickly 
through tunnels and across lofty viaducts to Anotta Bay, a large col- 
lection of wooden shanties noted for its mosquitoes, but with the blue 
Caribbean stretching away beyond it to the horizon. 

Along the edge of this the railway squirms through a wide fringe 
of cocoanuts for two hours more. The frequent stations swarm with 
female negro food-venders. Hindus are somewhat more numerous 
and though even the women nearly all wear Jamaican dress their Aryan 
features and unobtrusive manner distinguish them as quickly as their 
nose-rings and massive necklaces from the African bulk of the popula- 



430 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

tion. At length comes Port Antonio, with its twin harbors, embowered 
in hills half wooded with cocoanuts, an unexpectedly delightful place 
to the traveler who has known other Jamaican coast towns. Here the 
trade wind, unknown in Kingston, blows unceasingly, and that alone 
doubles the worth of any West Indian spot. Irregular and more com- 
pact than the two rivals it has probably outdistanced since the last 
census, Port Antonio has a more thriving, sanitary, comfort-loving air, 
thanks perhaps to the American influence of its banana trade. 

Jamaica claims advantages over all the rest of the world for banana 
cultivation. The vast tracts of virgin land in Central America and 
Colombia are two days farther from the principal market. Costa Rica 
is hampered by frequent droughts at the very season when the fruit 
most needs rain ; for the great game in banana growing is to have them 
ready to cut at the time when other fruit is scarce in the north. Cuba 
is a trifle too near the north pole, it is wedded to its sugar industry, 
and its labor is several times more expensive than that of Jamaica. 
Bananas demand heat, moisture, and a good fat soil, and all these may 
be had in the largest of the British West Indies, particularly in the 
northeastern parish of Portland, for the Blue Mountains which deny 
Kingston and its vicinity the rainfall it needs precipitate most of it 
here. What was then a little known fruit in American markets was 
first planted on a large scale in this very parish a half century ago. 
By 1894 it had become the most important export of the island, out- 
distancing both products of the sugarcane, and twenty years later it 
constituted sixty per cent, of Jamaica's contribution to the world's 
larder. The war, abetted by three consecutive hurricanes, the banana's 
greatest enemy, reversed this condition, but the sugar-men themselves 
do not long hope to hold their new lead. 

I chanced to reach Port Antonio at the very height of a banana war. 
The two powerful older companies had determined to annihilate a new 
one by that simple little method of starving it to death. Before the 
World War a bunch of bananas seldom sold for more than two shillings 
and six pence in Jamaica, but the competition of the newcomers had 
gradually forced this up to four shillings. In the single day of my 
visit it advanced hourly by leaps and bounds, — five shillings, five 
shillings and three pence commission, six shillings, six and six, seven 
shillings, with a six pence commission if need be, and free transporta- 
tion to the port — as often as the interlopers covered their bids the im- 
perturbable managers of the powerful companies sent out new induce- 
ments over their private telephone system, until the joyful planters of 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 431 

some sections were pocketing eleven shillings for every bunch of bananas 
they could lay down at the roadside bordering their fields. The fruit 
poured into Port Antonio in an endless stream, by motor-truck, by 
wagon, pack-donkey, on the heads of men and women, for even the 
negroes who had but a single bunch worth cutting hastened to part 
with it at this unprecedented price. 

But let us watch the process from the ground up, for the benefit of 
those who know the banana only as it appears on the fruit-seller's stand. 
We have only to catch one of the mammoth trucks thundering away 
empty into the hills in the direction of Mooretown, once a settlement of 
Maroons. Every little while along the way, jolly, muscular negro 
laborers swing up over the tail-board until by the time we have reached 
Golden Vale, said to be the oldest export banana farm in the world, 
there are enough of them to load the truck in a bare twenty minutes. 
It is scarcely necessary to say, I suppose, that bananas grow on a 
species of mammoth weed rather than a tree, that each produces a 
single bunch, that this grows " upside down " from our f ruitstand point 
of view, and that they must be cut before they are ripe. Golden Vale 
looks like an immense green lake surrounded by mountains, up the 
lower slopes of which the bananas climb for a considerable distance. 
Close overhead sits Blue Mountain Peak, coiffed in blue-black cloitds. 
Hindu men, whom the overseers invariably address as " Babu," do most 
of the cutting, while the more powerful but less careful negroes do the 
handling. The " Babus " wander in and out through the green arch- 
ways, giving a glance at each hanging bunch. When they see one which 
has reached the proper stage of development, they grasp it by the pro- 
truding stem, to which the big blue flower usually still clings, and pull 
down " tree " and all with a savage jerk. A machete, called a cutlass 
in Jamaica, flashes, a negro catches the bunch as it falls, another slash 
severs the flower-bearing stem a few inches from the top-most bananas, 
a third leaves the " tree " a mere stump, shoulder-high, and the cutters 
continue their search. Days later, when its sap has run back into the 
roots, the stump is cut off at the ground and a new shoot springs up to 
produce next year's bunch. The bunches that have been gathered 
are wrapped in dry brown banana leaves, and carried to the roadside, 
along which other brown heaps lie everywhere as we hurry down to the 
port, the loaders dropping off one by one at their shanties or the fre- 
quent rum-shops along the way. Quick handling is an absolute 
requisite in the banana business, and many a planter has come to grief 
by not giving sufficient attention to the question of transportation. 



432 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 






Arrived at the wharves the truck is as quickly unloaded, and an end- 
less chain of negroes, nearly all women, take up the task of distribution, 
according to size and destination. For there are " English " and 
" American " bananas, grown in the same field and differing not at all 
in species but by about ten days in their cutting time, so that the former 
are lean and the latter fat. Moreover, a bunch is not by any means 
always a bunch in the language of the banana companies. In the first 
place they are more often called " stems," and a " stem " must have at 
least ni-.e " hands " of fruit (the latter average a dozen bananas each) 
if it is to be paid for as a full bunch. If it has more than that well and 
good ; that is the company's gain and no one's loss. But if there are 
but eight " hands " it is rated two thirds of a " stem," if seven, one half, 
if six, one fourth, if less than that the planter might better have fed it 
to his hogs or his laborers, for the buyers will have none of it. This 
rating is less unjust than it appears, for the fewer the "hands" the 
smaller and fewer are the bananas. 

The slouching negroes who make up the endless chain, are not re- 
quired to tax their minds with these problems of size and nationality. 
They use their heads, to be sure, but only in the manner that seems 
best fitted to the race — as common carriers. Two men snatch up the 
bunches one by one, casting aside the brown leaf wrappers, and lay each 
one flat on a passing head, the owner of which shuffles away as if it 
were burdened with nothing but a hat instead of an average weight of 
eighty pounds. At the edge of the shed in which the bananas are piled 
to await prompt shipment stands a high desk with three men, usually 
quadroons or lighter, standing about it. The oldest, most intelligent, 
and most experienced looking of these casts what seems to be a careless 
glance at each " stem " and mumbles in a weary monotone, " English, 
eight," " American, nine," " English, seven," or some other of the 
„ combinations ; his most youthful companion makes a pencil mark on 
the ledger before him, the least lively looking of the trio hands a metal 
or cardboard disk to the carrier, who drops it into a pocket and slouches 
on to the particular pile to which her burden has been assigned. On 
the way she passes a negro armed with a cutlass, who lops off the 
protruding ends of the stem in front of her nose and behind her ears 
as she walks without so much as arousing a flicker of her drowsy, 
black eyelids. 

When the ship comes in, which must be that night or at latest next 
day, a similar endless chain of negroes, more nearly male in sex, 
carry the bananas on board, a tally-clerk ringing the bell of an auto- 




Private graveyards are to be found all over Jamaica 




A street of Basse Terre, capital of Guadeloupe 




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AFRICAN JAMAICA 433 

matic counter in his hand as each " stem " passes. In some ports a 
wide leather belt takes the place of this human chain. But a large 
gang is required for all that, and when the last pile has disappeared 
from the wharf the carriers strew themselves about it and sleep soundly 
on the hard planks until the next load arrives. Its quota supplied, the 
steamer's hatches are quickly battened down, icy air is turned in upon 
the perishable cargo, and the vessel rushes full speed ahead for the 
United States or England, where the fruit begins to rattle away in 
other trucks before the mere human passengers have leave to descend 
the gangway. Not until it has reached the retailer does it take on that 
golden yellow hue that is familiar to the ultimate consumer. 

I dropped off at Buff Bay station on the return journey for a jaunt 
over the Blue Mountain range. The " finger-boards " announced the 
distance to Kingston as forty-three miles, but there are many short- 
cuts and an average pedestrian can make the journey in a single day. It 
is a pleasant walk despite the fact that the first sixteen miles impose 
a climb of 4080 feet to Hardware Gap. For the foothills begin at 
once, and the road, narrow and grass-grown from disuse except near 
the coast, climbs in almost constant shade along the bank of Buff Bay 
river, and the trade wind sweeps incessantly up the valley. Jamaica 
is noted for its birds, of which there are said to be more than forty 
varieties peculiar to the island, and the majority of them seem to make 
this region their chief rendezvous. Perpendicular banana fields cover 
the hillsides here and there as high as they can endure the altitude. 
Masses of bamboos lend a needed touch of daintiness to the dense 
greenery, as a red-brown tree now and then speckling the steep slopes 
adds contrast to what would be an almost monotonous color. Then 
there are the akee-trees, numerous throughout Jamaica, with their 
bright red, pear-shaped fruit, a favorite food among the negroes, though 
it is deadly poison except at certain stages of its growth, and even 
then is reputed the cause of the vomiting sickness that is prevalent 
among the masses. 

Higher up every turn of the road brings to view a new waterfall, 
standing out against the greenery in flashing whiteness. No wonder 
the aborigines called the island Xamayca, the land of springs and water ; 
and how one regrets that those same red men do not inhabit it still, 
if only to give relief from the monotony of black, brutal faces that in 
time grow almost intolerable to the traveler in the West Indies, until 
there come moments when he would give all he possesses to see these 



: 



434 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

gems of the Caribbean as they were before they became mere hives 
of African slovenliness. But the only Arawaks left in the Jamaica of 
to-day are those which uphold the arms of the colony on its shield. 
Here indeed the ancient saying that " every prospect pleases and only 
man is vile " reaches its full meaning. 

I grew weary at length of the incessant negro impudence along the 
way, which ranged from foul-mouthed shouts to more or less innocent 
demands of " Heh, bukra, what you sell ? " It is a ridiculous failing, 
no doubt, but I detest being taken for a peddler. I took to shouting 
back, " I am selling something to make niggers white. Want some ? " 
But, alas, sarcasm seldom penetrates the African skull. Far from re- 
senting my rudeness, the simple-minded souls greeted it with roars of 
laughter or took it seriously, more often the latter. Dozens called 
after me to know the price of this desirable remedy ; several followed 
me up the road offering to purchase ; one old woman pursued me for 
nearly half a mile; one group sent a boy running after me, clamoring 
to know the cost of my wares. " A thousand pounds," I called back 
over my shoulder, which being duly reported in all solemnity to the 
group, brought forth a chorus of giggles and a regretful-toned, " Ah, 
him humbug we ! " 

The last two hours, from Jigger foot Market to the summit, was a 
laborious climb, but unlike many such it was lightened by frequent 
streams of clear, cold water. Then all at once I found myself at the 
gap, or abra, as the Spaniards would call it, and upon me burst a view 
worth many times the exertion. All the Liguanea plain from St. 
Thomas parish to Spanish Town and beyond, far beyond, into the far- 
thermost hills of St. Catherine's lay spread out like a colored map 
on a draughtsman's table, Kingston in full sight from the scattered rocks 
far outside its harbor, with the sea breaking white upon them, to its last 
suburbs among the foothills, the sand reef called the Palisadoes curving 
like a fishhook about the harbor, the remnants of what once boasted 
itself the most wicked town on earth at its point, the water about it 
so clear that one might easily have fancied he saw the sunken city of 
the buccaneers. There is spring water at the very edge of the gap 
and if one has thought to bring a pocket lunch there is nothing to hinder 
a long contemplation of this marvelous panorama, except the gradually 
penetrating cold of the mountains, which seems indeed an anachronism 
within plain sight of sweltering Kingston. 

This sent me striding downward again sooner than I had expected. 
A hill covered with an abandoned cluster of big barracks soon cut off 



AFRICAN JAMAICA 435 

Kingston and most of the plain, and left the eyes to contemplate a 
nearer scene. Ahead, the road, leisurely and still grassy, had clawed 
itself a foothold in the rocky hillside, sheer and wooded with scrub 
growth everywhere except where landslides had scratched a white 
line down its face. Birds sang lustily, as if tuning up their voices for a 
later public appearance ; human kind was pleasantly conspicuous by 
its absence. Beyond, on the steep flank of Catherine's Peak, the soldier 
town of Newcastle, where British " Tommies " live in an agreeable 
climate and still keep an eye on Kingston, went down like a giant's 
stairway into the gorge, an immense gorge always at my very feet, with 
little strings of roads winding in and out along its bottom as if in vain 
quest of an exit. And though the plain below had been faintly hazy 
and there were banks of clouds in the sky high above, the twin peaks of 
Blue Mountain range, 7360 higher than the sea, stood out as plainly as 
though one might have thrown a stone over them. 

Five miles constantly downward by a mountain trail, though it is 
twice that by the highway, brings one from Newcastle to Gordontown, 
a somnolent hamlet closely shut in by high hills and noisy with the little 
river which furnishes Kingston its water. Down the bank of this 
I hurried on to the plain of Liguanea, where rocking street-cars carry- 
one quickly into the insolent capital, for the mangoes were already 
ripening and it was high time we sailed away from the island Columbus 
called Santa Gloria. 



THE FRENCH WEST INDIES 
AND THE OTHERS 



CHAPTER XVIII 

GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES 

THERE is a suggestion of the pathetic in the name by which 
the French call their possessions in the New World — 
" L'Amerique Francaise." It recalls the days when the terri- 
tory they held on the western hemisphere was really worth that title, 
when Canada and Louisiana promised to grow into a great French 
empire in the west, and nothing suggested that a brief century would 
see their holdings reduced to a few fragments wedged into the string 
of British islands that form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean. 
The " French America " of to-day, except for Cayenne, a mere penal 
colony backed by a tiny slice of unexplored South American wilderness, 
consists of the minor islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and half 
a dozen islets dependent on the former. It is far better entitled to the 
more modest official name of " French Antilles." 

Guadeloupe — if I may be allowed an unpleasant comparison — is 
shaped like a pair of lungs, the left one flat and low, the other ex- 
panded into splendid mountain heights. They are really two islands 
separated by the short Salt River, across which is flung a single wooden 
bridge, and by some geographical oversight, their names have been 
twisted. The lowland to the east masquerades under the false title of 
Grande Terre, while the truly great land of magnificent heights and 
mighty ravines to the south and west is miscalled Basse Terre. The 
misnomers suggest that they were named by some bureaucrat seated 
before a map, rather than by explorers on the spot. 

Columbus landed on what the natives called Turukera or Karnkera 
on his second voyage — a busy time, indeed, he must have had keeping 
his log on that journey — and recalled the promise he had made to 
the monks of Nuestra Sefiora de Guadeloupe in Estremadura to name 
an island in honor of their patron Lady. He found human flesh 
cooking in pots on the beach and knew that he had discovered at last 
a land of the Caribs, the warlike cannibals of whom he had heard in 
Hispaniola. Among other things he saw here his first pineapple — and 
no doubt, like all newcomers, was surprised to find they do not grow on 
trees. Ubiquitous old Ponce de Leon attempted to colonize the island 

439 



440 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

in 1515, but was driven out by the imminent danger of being served up 
in a native barbecue. The first French to land were some missionaries 
who brought the aborigines bodily nourishment instead of the spiritual 
provender they had planned. It was not until the days of Richelieu 
that letters patent were issued giving a private company a monopoly 
of the island, which was gradually covered with French colonists and 
sugar-cane. African slavery followed as a matter of course, with its 
concomitant slave revolts, one of which came near to turning Guade- 
loupe into another Haiti, and for almost two centuries the history of 
the island was a constant succession of attempts on the part of England 
to add it to her possessions, as she did most of the French Antilles. 
Then in 1814 a treaty left it definitely French, slavery was abolished in 
1848, and since that day Guadeloupe has followed the political reverses 
and successes of la mere patrie. 

Basse Terre, the capital, is a modest little town on the southwest 
corner of the mountainous half of the island bearing the same name. 
Dating from the early days of French colonization, it once enjoyed a 
considerable importance, most of which disappeared with the founding 
of Pointe-a-Pitre, in a similar corner of the flat and more productive 
Grande Terre. The rape of its commerce by the parvenu has left it 
merely the seat of government, the Washington of the colony, more 
subservient to its business-bent metropolis than it likes to admit. This 
French custom of endowing their islands with separate official and 
commercial capitals has its advantages over the British scheme of col- 
lecting all the eggs in one basket. Martinique would have been left 
in a far sadder state had the destruction of St. Pierre wiped out its 
governmental as well as its business center. But there are also certain 
drawbacks to this more thoughtful plan; the traveler, for instance, 
who had hoped to find certain sources of information in Basse Terre is 
likely to learn that they live at " la Pointe," and vice versa. 

Built in the form of a spreading amphitheater and climbing a little 
way up the surge of ground that culminates in the volcano Soufriere, 
rival of Pelee in all but its destructiveness, a scant ten miles behind it, 
the official capital is half hidden under a smothering foliage of trees, 
which stretch away in a vast carpet of verdure into the mountains be- 
yond. Its open roadstead is commonly an unbroken expanse of Carib- 
bean blue, often without even a schooner riding at anchor to suggest 
the olden days of maritime industry. Though the French mail-packets 
make this their last port of call before turning their prows into the 
Atlantic, or the first on the outward journey, they usually come and 



GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES 441 

are gone in the night, with few inhabitants the wiser. The latter 
seem to worry little at this comparative slight, and dawdle on through 
a provincial life as if they had lost all hope or desire to wrest from 
" the Point " its frequent communion with the outside world. An old 
fort half covered with vegetation, a rambling government building con- 
structed in the comfort-scorning, built-to-stay style of most French 
official structures of bygone centuries, are almost the only signs to dis- 
tinguish it from half a dozen mere bourgs scattered about the edge of 
the island. A governor sent out from France dwells in a villa up in 
the hills; his few white assistants are bureaucrats tossed at random 
about the French colonies from Madagascar to Cayenne by a stroke of 
the pen in Paris, and they have little in common with the racial mulat- 
toes who dwell in their uninviting, chiefly wooden houses lining the few 
long and rather unkempt streets of the drowsy capital, except an ardent, 
almost unquestioning patriotism for la France. 

Good highways, with automobiles scattered along them, climb into 
the hills, especially to St. Claude, with its suburban dwellings, its big 
hospital, where boarders in the soundest of health are accepted, and its 
embracing view of the Caribbean already far below, and the dome of 
Soufriere almost sheer overhead. Higher still lies Matouba, where one 
may bathe in icy streams within half an hour of the tropic and enervat- 
ing sea-coast. But there the highways cease, dwindling away into trails 
through coffee-groves and verdure-vaulted footpaths which are gradu- 
ally lost in the great mountain wilderness, so primitive and unexplored 
that even the map in the governor's office below shows only a blank 
space for all the heart of Basse Terre, the inaccessibility of which is 
typified in the name of its central peak, Mt. Sans Toucher. Other high- 
ways partly encircle the rugged half-island, clinging close to the shore, 
but feasible communication ceases everywhere within a few kilometers 
of the coast. Thus, though Basse Terre is virgin fertile in almost 
all its extent, and generously watered by countless springs and many 
rivers, it produces little for the outside world except a few tons of 
vanilla. 

Like all the West Indies, it has almost no four-footed wild life. 
The agouti, of about the size of a rabbit and much prized for its savory 
flesh, is the only indigenous quadruped. The raccoon, brought from 
our own land long ago, has become acclimated and numerous ; the 
island is infested with an enormous toad that was introduced to kill the 
rats, but which has prodigiously spread without doing much damage 
to the rodents. Martinique and Guadeloupe mutually accuse each 



442 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

other of harboring the deadly fer de lance, but neither seems to be 
able to produce unquestionable proof either of its own innocence or of 
its rival's guilt. 

There are guaguas also in the French islands, where they are called 
autos de poste. But there is little room in them compared with the 
demand for places, and a curt " Pas de place " is almost certain to be 
the greeting of the would-be traveler who does not buy his ticket at least 
the day before. Moreover, ticket or no ticket, it behooves him to 
be on hand at the back of the post-office well before the starting-hour 
set unless he would see his reserved place squeezed out of existence 
before he has occupied it or the conveyance gone before he arrives. 
For the public means of transport in the French West Indies have a 
mania for starting ahead of time that is little less disconcerting than the 
manana temperament of their Spanish neighbors, particularly as their 
favorite official hour of departure is daybreak. 

Once upon a time the governor of Guadeloupe invited the officials 
of Pointe-a-Pitre to a ball at the capital. They left on a sailboat, the 
ladies in evening dress. In theory it is a journey of only a few hours, 
even in a sailing vessel. But this time the wind turned contrary, after 
the custom of winds, the boat was forced to put to sea, and it turned 
up six days afterward — in St. Thomas ! These unhappy experiences 
are no longer required of the residents of the two capitals, for to-day 
a highway equal, except in spots, to those of France connects the two 
towns, nearly fifty miles apart, and an auto de poste makes the round 
trip daily. Then, too, as in all the Antilles, there are automobiles for 
hire to those whose income is not particularly limited. 

The tropical night showed no sign of fading when the postal omnibus, 
its five cross seats packed with travelers of both sexes until its sides 
groaned, its every available space of running-boards, mud-guards, and 
bumper piled high with mail-sacks and baggage, rumbled away from 
the angry group of unsuccessful passengers gathered before the Basse 
Terre post-office. As we chugged out through the old fortress gate, a 
thin streak of light suddenly developed on the eastern horizon, widened 
with the rapidity of a stage effect too quickly timed, wiped out the 
blue-black dome of sky overhead, and sent the last remnants of night 
scurrying from their lurking-places like thieves before the gigantic 
flashlight that sprang above the rim of the earth to the east with un- 
natural, theatrical swiftness. In the darkness I had taken several of 
my fellow-passengers to be white. The same slanting sunshine that 






GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES 443 



threw far to the westward the disheveled shadows of the cocoanut- 
palms betrayed the tell-tale African features of the lightest of them. 
Behind us spread a fairy panorama as we climbed to Gourbeyre, beyond 
which another opened out as we descended again through Dole, with its 
" summer " homes and its steaming hot-water falls at the very edge 
of the road. Having cut off the southern nose of the island and 
regained the coast once more at Trois Rivieres, we clung close to this 
all the rest of the journey, as if any further encroachment upon the 
rugged domain of Soufriere, its head wrapped in a purple-black mantle 
of clouds above us, might rouse the slumbering giant to vent his wrath 
upon puny mankind. 

The " Rue Gerville-Reache " in which we halted a moment to ex- 
change mail-sacks recalled the fact that the native of Guadeloupe best 
known to the outside world is a woman, as is the case with Martinique. 
Villas hidden away in the dense greenery gave way to little bay-like 
cane-fields, some of them so large as to boast tiny railroads, while 
here and there a buttress of the volcano above forced us out to the edge 
of the surf. In the offing Guadeloupe's smallest dependencies, a cluster 
of islands named Les Saintes because Columbus discovered them on 
All Saints' Day, stood forth from the sea like the domes of Oriental 
fantasy. Now and again the chauffeur or his assistant snatched at a 
letter held out by some countryman, indifferent to his shout of protest 
if they missed it, for they deigned to stop only before the town post- 
offices. The demand for seats was continuous, but those who had won 
them showed no inclination to descend. A score of times we sped 
past some lady of color all dressed up in her most resplendent turban, 
foulard, and ample, flower-printed calico gown, who had hoped to go 
to town that day, the chauffeur indicating by a disdainful wave of the 
hand across his body that there was " nothing doing." Veritable riots 
of words assailed him at each halt, as if he might have produced new 
seats, magician-like, from his sleeve. One by one several male pas- 
sengers took to displaying their fancied knowledge of English for my 
benefit ; once a burly schooner-captain with just enough negro blood in 
his veins to make his hair curl, next a darker pair of graduates of the 
Scrbcnne, who, once having impressed their fellow-passengers with 
their extraordinary learning, dropped back into French again, a French 
more precise and chosen than that of Paris, as soon as they found I 
understood it. 

Even in the thatched huts along the way there was considerable more 
commodite than in those of Haiti. The old semispherical sugar-kettles 



444 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

one finds scattered throughout the West Indies were here enclosed in 
stones and mortar and used as outdoor ovens. At Petit Bourg we came 
out. on the edge of the open sea again, with a view across the bay to 
Pointe-a-Pitre, and behind it flat, unscenic Grande Terre, without even 
a hill to enliven its horizon. Soon we dropped down into a dreary level 
country utterly unlike the rolling cane-covered land swelling into moun- 
tains behind us, and sped through mangrove swamps that burdened 
the air with their rotting, salty smell, rumbled across the stagnant 
Riviere Salee, six miles long and some fifteen feet deep, which divides 
Guadeloupe into two islands, and turned into a broad, white, dusty 
road that not long after became the main street of " La Pointe." 

Point-a-Pitre is said to have taken its name from the fact that the 
" point " on which it was founded a century later than Basse Terre be- 
longed to a Dutchman named Peters. Many refugees of this nationality 
settled in the French islands after the Portuguese drove them out of 
Brazil. The commercial capital is situated at the mouth of the Salt 
River, in one of the hottest and most uninviting spots in the West Indies. 
Across the bay Guadeloupe proper, piled up in its labyrinth of mountains 
veiled in the blue haze of distance, seems to invite the perspiring in- 
habitants to cease their bargainings and retire to the cool heights. 
Young as it is, " the Point " has long since outgrown Basse Terre in 
size and importance. It is a deadly flat town, with wide, right-angled 
streets, fairly well paved in a kind of crude concrete, with here and 
there a corner that recalls Paris, as do the street names. Its gray 
plaster houses have heavy wooden shutters and door-sized blinds that 
give them a curiously furtive air. Except for the turbans and calicos 
of the negresses, and the gamut of complexions, it is rather a colorless 
town, even the " cathedral " being of the prevailing gray, unpainted 
tint, though set off by a slight square tower in flaming red. The narrow 
entrance to its capacious bay is flanked by cocoanut-palms that stretch 
far around and finally envelop it, the view from the sea having little to 
attract the eye. The central square pulsates from dawn until the sun 
is high overhead with ceaselessly chattering market-women dressed in 
the hectic cotton garb peculiar to the French islands. Down by the 
wharves surges another market where fishermen in immense round 
hats come with their boatloads of fish and sundry sea-foods, including 
the langouste, a clawless lobster unsurpassed for quality and quantity 
of flesh and selling for the equivalent of a quarter. 

There are suggestions of Parisian street life in Pointe-a-Pitre, inter- 
larded with tropical touches of its own. Frenchmen whose faces give 



GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES 445 

evidence that they have not left their cuisine and wine-cellars behind 
cling tenaciously to those white pith helmets without which no man 
of their race thinks he can endure the tropics. Soldiers and ex-soldiers 
with varying degrees of African complexions stalk about in their 
horizon-blue or colonial khaki, a string of medals gleaming on their 
chests. Negroes in Napoleon III beards stroll along the shaded edge 
of the streets with a certain Latin dignity befitting such adornment, 
even when it is accompanied by bare feet. Humped oxen, yoked some- 
times on the neck, more often on the horns, saunter through town with 
their cumbersome carts. The town-criers, two men in uniform, the 
one beating a- drum and the other reading aloud an official notice on 
each corner, carry the thoughts back to medieval France. Cafes with 
awning-shaded tables, monopolizing the sidewalks, notices exceedingly 
French not only in wording, but in general appearance, posted on 
house and shop walls, even the rather run-down aspect of the buildings, 
give the place a decidedly French atmosphere. If other proof of its 
nationality were needed, there are the crowds of wilted, yet patient, 
people packed about the wickets of post-office, telegraph station, and 
all other points where the public and the ambitionless, red-tape-ridden 
mortals whom France appoints to minor government office come into 
contact. 

In the large, rather pleasantly unkempt park, shaded with veritable 
grandfathers among trees, lepers, victims of the " big leg," and other 
loathsome ailments were cutting the grass with crude shears and little 
toy hoes. In the outskirts, to say nothing of suspicious odors in the 
heart of town, stood stagnant ditches of unassorted garbage. Venders 
of indecent photographs marched brazenly about town, buttonholing 
the male tourist at every opportunity. The children did less open 
begging than those in the British islands, but there were white boys 
and girls among them whose manners and appearance showed them in 
a little less degraded condition than the blacks. What a place Pointe- 
a-Pitre alone would be to " clean up " to something approaching our 
standards of sanitation and domestic morals, were we so foolish as to 
follow a recent suggestion and purchase the French Antilles. 

We drifted into a courtroom during a civil trial. The room itself 
appeared not to have been swept or dusted for years except in those 
conspicuous central portions where it was unavoidable ; cobwebs fes- 
tooned every corner ; little heaps of debris lay under nearly every bench. 
Yet there were numerous statues in and about the building. The court 
consisted of three judges, a white man in the middle, flanked by two 



446 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

mulattos, all of them, as well as the more or less negro lawyers, dressed 
in black robes trimmed with " ermine " ; that is, with moth-eaten rabbit- 
skin cuffs and lapels. On their heads were curious skull-caps, and be- 
neath their robes impressed white or khaki trousers of a cheap material, 
which suggested that the high cost of clothing burdened even these 
lofty officials. A lawyer was ranting monotonously, the gist of his 
remarks being that while all Guadeloupe knew that it was the desire of 
a gentleman recently deceased to leave his fortune to the plaintiff, it 
was quite impossible to carry out his desires because he had neglected 
to decorate his will with the required government stamp. Laboriously 
a yellow clerk, also in a robe, sat slowly scratching away with an old- 
fashioned steel pen, adding to the stacks of dog-eared hand-written 
papers that already filled a musty room next door almost to over- 
flowing. Surely there was no doubt about Pointe-a-Pitre being French 
despite the un-Parisian complexions of its inhabitants. 

If it is less beautiful than the mountainous half of Guadeloupe, 
Grande Terre had a materialistic advantage over the misnamed highland 
to the west. Its flatness makes it everywhere accessible by a network 
of good highways. A broad, white road stretches out along the coast 
through the mangroves that surround the commercial capital, and 
pushes on to the considerable towns of Ste. Anne, St. Frangois, and Le 
Moule, while other highways crisscross the island, giving easy com- 
munication for all the sugar-mills scattered about it. More exactly 
they are rum-mills, for the French islanders give far more attention 
to their far-famed liquor, and the cane-fields that all but cover Grande 
Terre serve almost exclusively for filling casks and bottles. Their 
processes are still rather primitive, but fortunes have been won during 
the war, for all that. Once out upon this half of the island, the traveler 
finds it has a few low hills and ridges, but they are so slight that a 
bicycle affords easy means of communication, which can be said of few 
West Indian islands. Along the mangrove-lined coast are many shacks 
almost as carelessly thrown together as those of Haiti, yet all over 
Guadeloupe there is patent evidence that the negro is a far different 
fellow when directed by the white man than when running wild. The 
song of the jungle by night is broken by the constant roar of distant 
breakers and the noisy, merry negro voices and primitive laughter 
that explode now and then in the tropical darkness, while fireflies swarm 
so thickly that they look to the wanderer along the coast roads like the 
electric-lights of a large city. 



GUADELOUPE AND DEPENDENCIES 447 

All the scattered islets of the French West Indies are dependencies 
of Guadeloupe, being geographically nearer that island, leaving Mar- 
tinique to concern herself with strictly domestic affairs. The most 
important of these is Marie Galante, six leagues south of Grande Terre, 
with fifteen thousand inhabitants and several usines to turn her cane- 
fields into rum. Les Saintes, Petite Terre, and Desirade, the latter the 
first landfall of Columbus on his second voyage, and owing its name to 
that circumstance, lie somewhat nearer the mother island. Far to the 
north is St. Martin, the possession of which France also shares with 
Holland despite its barely forty square miles of extent, making it the 
smallest territory in the world with two nationalities. No less interest- 
ing, though still more tiny, is the neighboring isle of St. Barthelemy, 
colloquially called " St. Baits." The inhabitants are chiefly white, and 
among them one finds the physiognomy, traditions, and customs of 
their Norman ancestors. Yet though they speak French, it is only 
badly, the prevailing language being English, or at least the caricature 
of that tongue which many decades of isolation have developed. 

The history of " St. Barts " recalls another nation that once had 
West Indian ambitions. In 1784 Louis XVI ceded the island to Sweden 
in return for the right to establish at Gothenburg a depot for French 
merchandise. But its isolation and distance from its homeland made it 
a burden to the Swedes, and in 1877, after all but one of its 351 
inhabitants had voted in favor of a return to French nationality, it 
was handed back free of charge, King Oscar II making a gift to the 
inhabitants of the eighty thousand francs' worth of crown property on 
the island. Since then the people seem again to have changed their 
minds, due probably to their subjection to the colored politicians of 
Guadeloupe. A few months ago, when the Crown Prince of Sweden 
called at " St. Barts " on his way to a hunting expedition in South 
America, he was received with open arms, and left with what the 
natives took to be a promise to assist them to transfer their allegiance 
to England or the United States, preferably the latter. Under the Stars 
and Stripes, they argue, their " great resources " would be fittingly 
developed. The island was once noted for its pineapples, but the 
tendency of shipping to strike farther southward and touch Barbados 
instead has ruined this, as it has the tree-cotton industry. Of volcanic 
formation, the island suffers for lack of trees and water, being forced 
to hoard its rainfall in large cisterns, like St. Thomas. Gustavia, the 
capital, was once rich and prosperous, being a depot of French and 
British corsairs who carried on trade with the Spanish colonies. There 



448 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

are still immense cellars built to hold the booty and merchandise, and 
zinc and lead mines that lie unexploited for lack of capital. To-day the 
inhabitants live for the most part in abject poverty, getting most of 
their sustenance from the neighboring islands and emigrating to Guade- 
loupe, where they are noted for their excellency as servants, despite 
their unf amiliarity with the native " Creole." 




In the outskirts of Guadeloupe's commercial capital 




Fort de France, capital of Martinique 




3 

w 



CHAPTER XIX 

RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 

MARTINIQUE, though considerably smaller than Guadeloupe, 
from which it is separated by the British island of Dominica, 
probably means more to the average American, possibly 
because within the memory of the present generation it was the scene 
of the greatest catastrophe in the recorded history of the Western 
hemisphere. Some forty miles long and averaging about half of that 
in width, it is essentially volcanic in origin, untold centuries of eruptions 
having given it an almost unbrokenly mountainous character, heaping 
up those many mornes and pitons, as its large and small cone-shaped 
peaks are called, which stretch from its one end to the other. Its latest 
census, now ten years old, credited it with 184,000 inhabitants, ten 
thousand of whom consider themselves pure white. Martinique is 
fond of calling herself the " Queen of the French Antilles," a title not 
wholly without justification, and to cite the fact that Cayenne and 
Guadeloupe are subservient to her in certain governmental matters as 
proof that she is the favorite American child of the mother country. 

The traveler who disembarks in the harbor of Fort de France, capital 
of Martinique since 1680, is sure to have impressed upon him the fact 
that the negro with French training is even more inefficient under excite- 
ment than the excitable Gaul himself. Barely has the steamer come to 
anchor when her gangway becomes a shrieking, struggling, all but 
immovable mass of barefoot boatmen, of more or less negro policemen, 
custom employees, hotel runners, porters, ships' agents, embarking and 
disembarking passengers, and venders of minor local products, all 
ignorant of that sophomoric law of physics that descending and ascend- 
ing bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Bags, 
bundles, crates, valises, and trunks are dragged helter-skelter down this 
seething sloping bedlam, one of the latter now and then eluding the 
grasp of the struggling boatman, who is forced to dedicate one hand 
[to his own safety, and splashing into the sea, there to float serenely 
about for some moments until it is rescued single-handed by the same 
hare-brained individual. For the batelicrs of the French Antilles do 
[not believe in mutual cooperation. Three trunks suffered this particu- 

449 



45o ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

lar fate during our landing, but our own luck was less trying, the only 
mishap being that the boat loaded with all our worldly baggage, forced 
beyond the grasp of its owner by his clamoring rivals, began to float 
serenely out to sea. 

By some stroke of genius, indispensable to those who have been 
denied the lesser gift of common sense, the fellow succeeded in rescuing 
his craft before the swift tropical night had completely blotted it out, 
and a quarter of an hour later we scrambled up the end of a long, 
slender, not to say drunken and decrepit, wooden pier all but invisible 
in the thick darkness. A youth beside whom Rachel looked tall re- 
quired assistance in placing the trunk on his head, but once under it 
he requested that the valises be piled on top of it and scurried away 
as if he had nothing on his mind but the aged felt hat that served him 
as a pad. The douane was dirty, ramshackle, and lighted only with a 
pair of weak oil torches, but its officials were so courteous that we were 
not even required to lower our possessions from the bearer's head to 
the floor. A hotel facing the savanna resembled the hang-outs of 
Parisian apaches, but it was in some ways preferable to spending the 
night in the park. Luckily the " choice room " into which we were 
shown was only dimly lighted by a flickering candle. 

" Et le bain ? " I queried, as the chambermaid was hurrying away to 
resume her role as waitress. 

" Bath?" she murmured reminiscently, thrusting her turban-crowned 
African face back into the room. " Oh, yes, there is a tub below but — 
but it does n't function." 

"No water?" 

" Plenty of water, monsieur, but the stopper has been lost." 

" What do people do ? " 

" When messieurs les clients wish to bathe, they sit in the tub and 
pour water on themselves, but — " 

" Generally they don't wish to ? " I concluded caustically, but the 
intended sarcasm was completely lost on the femme-de-chambre, who 
replied with fetching simplicity, " No, usually not, monsieur." 

Luckily, the departure of a flock of tourists next day gave us admit- 
tance to the one tolerable hotel in the French West Indies. 

A few weak electric-light bulbs scattered here and there in the dense 
humid darkness did not give the town a particularly inviting aspect. 
On the broad grassy savane there was scarcely light enough to see 
where one was going, which made progress perilous, for the habits of 
personal sanitation of the French islanders are not merely bad; some 






RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 451 

of them are incredible. The French themselves being none too careful 
in such matters, it is hardly to be expected that their negro subjects 
would develop high standards. Few streets are well paved, most of 
them have open gutters down each side, but the slope of the town is 
fortunately sufficient to keep the running water clear except at about 
eight in the morning, which is the hour chosen by householders to get 
rid of their accumulated garbage. 

Though it was merely Friday evening, a band was playing, and 
playing well, a classical program in the savanna kiosk. Frenchmen, in 
huge pith helmets that gave them the aspect of wandering toadstools, 
were strolling under the big trees of the immense, grassy square. With 
them mingled, apparently on terms of complete equality, their colored 
compatriots, the women in Parisian hats or the chic little turban, with 
its single protruding donkey-ear, peculiar to Martinique, according to 
their social standing, the men in the drab garb of the mere male the 
world over. There was not exactly a boisterousness, but a French 
freedom from restraint which gave the gathering an atmosphere quite 
different from similar ones in the more solemn British West Indies. 
Among the most interesting features of the Antilles is to note how 
closely the imitative negroes resemble in manner, customs, and tempera- 
ment their ruling nations. Yet one conspicuous feature of French night 
life was absent from that of Fort de France — the aggressively amorous 
female of the species. 

By day we found the center of the savane occupied by the white 
marble statue of the most famous native of Martinique, the Empress 
Josephine. Surrounded by a quadrangle of magnificent royal palms, 
a bas relief of her crowning by Napoleon set into the pedestal, a medal- 
lion portrait of her imperial husband in one hand, she gazes away to- 
ward her birthplace across the bay with an expression which in certain 
lights suggests a wistful regret for ever having left it. But it is a 
flitting expression ; most of the time she is visibly the proud Empress 
of the French, and still the idol of her native Martinique, for all her 
checkered story. Of other statues the most conspicuous is that of 
Schoelcher, the Senator from the Antilles who fathered the emancipa- 
tion of the slaves, decorating the untended little plot before the Palais 
de Justice. 

In the sunlight Fort de France has a cheerful aspect. About the 
edge of the savanna are several open-air cafes, some of them housed 
in tents, none of them free from clients even in the busiest hours of 
the day. The town swarms with women in that gay costume of Mar- 



452 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Unique, which suggests moving-picture actresses, dressed for their ap- 
pearance before the camera, rather than staid housewives and market- 
women engaged in their unromantic daily tasks ; some of its buildings 
rival them in the African gorgeousness of their multicolored walls. 
Almost wholly destroyed by fire thirty years ago, it has nothing of the 
ancient air to be found in many West Indian cities, though some of its 
comparatively modern structures are already sadly down at heel. Once 
it was of secondary importance, a mere capital, like Basse Terre in 
Guadeloupe, but the destruction of St. Pierre increased its commercial 
prosperity, and its twenty-seven thousand inhabitants of ten years ago 
have considerably increased since then. The decrepit horse-carriages 
of the last decade have almost wholly given way to automobiles, Ameri- 
can in make by virtue of the war, and aware of their importance in an 
island with neither tramways nor railroads. Window glass, uncalled 
for in the tropics, is almost unknown, wooden jalousies taking the place 
of it when the blazing sunlight or a driving storm demands the closing 
of its habitually wide-open houses. 

Its " best families," few of them free from a touch of the tar-brush, 
have the customs of family isolation of the France of a century ago; its 
mulatto rank and file have the negro's indifference to publicity in the 
most intimate of domestic affairs. If one may judge by the prevalence 
of ugly French pince-nez, the whites and " high yellows " find the glaring 
sunlight and light-colored streets trying to the eyes. Seen from any 
of the several hills high above, the town is dull-red in tint, flat and all 
but treeless, except for its green rectangular savane, only the openwork 
red spire of the cathedral protruding above the mass. Yet when the 
sun plays its cloud shadows across it, and the musical bells of its single 
church are tolling through one of the interminable funerals, the Fort 
Royal of olden days is well worth the stiff climb an embracing view 
of it requires. 

The cathedral is modern, decidedly French in atmosphere despite 
strong negro leanings. Some of its stained-glass windows depict the 
native types, mulatto acolytes attending a white bishop, backed by the 
well-done likenesses of worshipers in the striking female costume of 
the island, with a male in solemn Sunday dress thrown in between for 
contrast. One wonders why the Spanish-Americans have not also 
adopted so effective a form of decoration instead of clinging tenaciously 
to the medieval types. In the congregation few pure whites are to be 
seen, except for the priests, and the nuns who herd their scores of girl 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 453 

orphans in brown ginghams and purple turbans into the gallery pews. 
The collection is taken up by a black priest — who gives change to those 
who have not come supplied with the customary small coin — but the 
officiating curates are wholly French. The lives they lead, if one may 
judge from certain indications, are more of a credit to their church 
than those of their colleagues in the Spanish tropics. 

Sunday in Fort de France is not the deadly dull Sabbath of the 
British West Indies. The market and many of the shops are open in 
the morning; the cooler hours of the afternoon find the town enlivened 
with strollers, from the ramparts of grim old Fort St. Louis to the 
banks of the Riviere Madame, lined by vari-colored boats drawn up out 
of the water, with whole jungles of nets hung out to dry, with carelessly 
constructed little houses, in the shadows of which squat chattering, 
boisterously laughing negroes. The evening is one of the three during 
the week on which the movies function. We attempted one night to 
attend the largest of these. A long line of automobiles was disgorging 
noisy, overdressed natives of all colors except pure white. About the 
doors squatted scores of turbaned women, each waiting patiently for 
some admirer to supply her with a ticket ; a swarm of ragged young 
black rascals blocked the entries, casting insolent glances, if not audible 
remarks, at the more attractive women, particularly if they chanced 
to be white. Black policemen garbed in resplendent white uniforms 
for once in the w r eek, stood gossiping in groups, waving to their friends, 
doing everything except making any attempt to keep order. Then, if 
further proof of the genuine Frenchness of Fort de France were needed, 
there was a clawing, shrieking mob wedged in an impenetrable mass 
about a wicket six inches square and waist-high, in which one negro 
kept his face plastered for ten minutes, trying in vain to agree with 
whomever was behind it on the purchase of a paper ticket. The 
French have many fine qualities, but public orderliness is not one of 
them, particularly when African blood runs in their veins. 

The great covered market of Fort de France is daily the scene of 
a similar uproar. By day it presents a kaleidoscopic panorama of 
venders and buyers in every known shade of garb and complexion ; by 
dark, when it remains open that late, it suggests some drunken inferno. 
Bargaining is one of the chief amusements of the West Indian negro ; 
when he has been reared in a French environment he seems to find 
double joy in it. Every purchase is the occasion for an extended 
quarrel which stops short of nothing but actual fisticuffs. A slice of 



454 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

meat tossed from the scales into a purchaser's basket invariably brings 
a shriek of protest from the seller. The buyer has " short-changed " 
him! Buyers always do, unless they are the despised tourists who 
always foolishly pay the first price demanded. A mighty shouting 
arises over the scene of contention ; it increases to an uproar that is 
almost audible above the general hubbub. The meat and the money 
are snatched back and forth a score of times ; foul names are seen, 
if not heard, on the thick lips of the shrieking opponents ; a copper is 
added to the handful of now bloody coins, withdrawn again as the 
seller slashes a match-sized strip off the maltreated slice of meat ; copper 
and strip are once more conceded, the screams grow deafening, until 
at length a bargain is struck, and the two part company with friendly 
nods that are mutual promises to engage in similar entertainment on 
the morrow. The tiny portions of Haitian markets are not found in 
those of the French Antilles. Whole boxes of matches, entire yams, 
sometimes as many as two or three bananas change hands in one 
single transaction. Many a matron whose purchases do not sum up to 
more than three or four pounds is followed by a porter, who gathers 
them into his basket. A few of these burden-bearers are white men, 
beings sunk so low that they slink about among the haughty and more 
muscular negroes like creatures who are only permitted to live on 
suff ranee ; for both the French islands have dwarfish types of similar 
history to the " Chachas " of St. Thomas. 

The traveler in the Lesser Antilles finds himself almost wholly cut 
off from the world's news. It is a rare cable that has not been broken 
for months, if not for years, and the local newspapers are faintly 
printed little rags through which one may search in vain for a hint of 
the happenings outside the particular island on which one chances to be 
marooned. Instead of news, the front pages are taken up with local 
political squabbles, and, in the French islands, with challenges to duels, 
set in the largest type available. Let it not be supposed, however, that 
these lead to any great amount of bloodshed. In virtually all cases the 
long series of letters exchanged between the contestants, or, more 
exactly, between their seconds, and set down at full length in the 
public prints, end on some such tone as : 

Messieurs Pinville and Larcher, representing M. Marc Larcher, and MM. 
Binet and Hantoni, representing M. Louis Percin, having met in the city hall in 
the matter of a demand for satisfaction from M. Marc Larcher by M. Persin, on 
account of an article in the " Democratic Coloniale " of March 20th, came to an 
agreement that there was a misunderstanding between M. Percin and M. Marc 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 455 

Larcher, neither the one nor the other having ever had the intention of making 
any allegations which should encroach upon the private life of either. 

In consequence, they declare the incident irrevocably closed. 

Done in duplicate at Fort de France, March 23, 1920, 

and signed by the pacifiers. Thus the principals have impressed upon 
their fellow-citizens their chivalrous code of honor and undaunted 
courage, the seconds have won a bit of personal publicity, and no harm 
has been done. In a way the Martinique system has its advantages over 
the more direct American method of a pair of black eyes. 

A coast steamer leaves Fort de France every morning at peep of dawn 
for what was once the larger city of St. Pierre. For three hours it 
chugs northwestward along the coast, dotted with little fisher villages 
half hidden behind cocoanut-palms and the long lines of pole-supported 
nets drying beneath them. Here and there it halts to pick up or dis- 
charge passengers in rowboats, and to take on the capital's daily supply 
of milk — in five-gallon Standard Oil tins corked with handfuls of 
of leaves. The sea is usually pond-smooth here under the lee of the 
island. Many sandstone cliffs as absolutely sheer as if they had been 
cut with a gigantic knife line the way, with little shrines at the foot of 
most of them to keep them from falling into the sea. Behind, the 
verdant mountains climb steeply into the sky, as if, the island being a 
bare twenty miles wide, they must make the most of the space allotted 
them. The coast is speckled with fishermen in broad, trapezoidal 
straw hats, standing erect in their precarious little boats or setting their 
nets for the day's catch. Their method is simple. Half a dozen of 
them fence in a great oval stretch of water near the shore with a single 
net hundreds of yards long and weighted on one side. Then, when 
only the floating support blocks remain above the surface, they proceed 
to throw stones into the enclosure, to pound the water with their 
paddles, to splash about like men gone suddenly mad. Apparently the 
fish rise to see what all the commotion is about, for half an hour later 
the fishermen begin to drag their net inshore, and the haul is seldom 
less than several boatloads of the finny tribe, of every size from the 
colt roux, resembling the sardine, to mammoth fish that must be quickly 
clubbed to death for safety sake, and of every variety known to the 
tropical seas. Already the inhabitants of the neighboring villages are 
trooping down to the shore with their native baskets and makeshift 
receptacles, and by the time the net is stretched out on its poles to dry 
the last of the catch has been sold and carried away. 



456 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

But we are nearing St. Pierre. Carbet, the last stop, where Colum- 
bus landed just four centuries before the great catastrophe, is falling 
astern, and as we round its protecting nose of land the flanks of Pelee 
rise before us, broken and wrinkled and cracked and heaped up in 
scorched brown slopes that end in blue-black clouds clinging tenaciously 
about the volcano's head, as if to shield the murderous old rascal from 
detection. This same steamer, one of the crew who served in the same 
capacity in those days tells us, barely escaped from the disaster that 
overwhelmed the chief city of the Lesser Antilles. She had left St. 
Pierre at daybreak — for her itinerary was reversed when the capital 
played second fiddle to her commercial rival — and was entering the 
harbor of Fort de France when two mighty explosions that seemed to 
shake all Martinique " set us praying for our friends in St. Pierre." 
Next day she returned, only to find — but just here our informant was 
called away to help in the landing, and left us to picture for ourselves 
the sight that met his eyes as he steamed into this open roadstead on 
that memorable morning. 

Ships no longer anchor off St. Pierre. For one thing, a shelf of the 
sea floor was broken off during the eruption, and left the harbor all 
but unfathomable. Besides, the world's shipping passes ruined St. 
Pierre by now, and only this little coaster comes daily to tie up to a 
tiny pier where once stretched long and busy wharves. At the end 
of it one is confronted by a statue, a nude female figure which is 
meant to be symbolical of the ruined city in the day of its agony. 
But the effect is unfortunate. For the thing is so inartistically done 
that it suggests a lady of limited intelligence crawling out of her bath- 
room after having inadvertently blown out the gas — and the ludicrous 
seems out of place in one's first pilgrimage to the American Pompeii. 

The St. Pierre of the beginning of this century was the most impor- j 
tant city of the French West Indies. More than that, it was noted 
throughout the Caribbean for its beauty, gaiety, and commercial 
activity. It was a stone city, of real cut stone, built in a perfect amphi- 
theater sloping gently down to the deeply blue sea, and cut sharply off 
at the rear by sheer hills that spring quickly into mountains. White 
pirogues and the pleasure boats of its wealthier inhabitants balanced 
themselves in its bay among steamers and sailing vessels from all 
parts of the world. Its boulevards were lined with splendid shade 
trees; its Jardin des Plantes ranked among the world's best botanical 
collections ; it had electric lights and the only tramways in the Lesser 
Antilles; its bourse was as busy in its way as our own Wall Street. 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 457 

Masses of gorgeous flamboyants, of red and purple bougainvillea, 
decorated its open places and its commodious residences, which stretched 
away into flowery suburbs with half a dozen pretty French names. 
In a way it had copied Paris too closely, for its night life was hectic 
with " sadly famous " casinos, with gaiety unconfined ; it felt a certain 
pride in hearing itself called the " naughtiest city in the West Indies." 

St. Pierre was proud of the old volcano that seemed to watch with 
a fatherly care over the destinies of the city at its feet. Never within 
the memory of the living generation had it given a sign of wrath. A 
pretty little lake filled its crater, with fougeres and begonias and soft 
velvety moss growing about its shores. To the Pierrotins it had long 
been the chosen place for picnics and Sunday excursions. 

Yet never was a people given fuller warning of impending disaster. 
As early as February in their final year of 1902 the inhabitants com- 
menced to complain of a sulphurous odor from the mountain. During 
the following month dense clouds began to rise about its summit. " Old 
Pelee is smoking again," the people told one another, laughingly; but 
not a man of them dreamed that their old playmate meant them any 
harm. On April 22 a light earthquake broke the cable to Dominica. 
On the twenty-fourth a rain of cinders fell on all the northern part of 
the island. The Sunday following saw many pleasure parties mounting 
to the crater-lake to watch the playfulness of " old Pelee " at close 
range. On the twenty-eighth great growlings were heard, as if some 
mammoth bear were struggling to escape from his prison in the bowels 
of the earth. From the beginning of May cinders fell almost daily over 
all Martinique. Steam rose from the crater ; bursts of fire, like magni- 
fied lightning flashes, played about the volcano's summit; the clouds 
grew so dense that the days were a perpetual twilight, the water-supply 
was half-ruined by the soot it carried. On the fifth a great deluge of 
boiling mud swept down the River Blanche, completely submerging a 
large sugar-factory on the edge of St. Pierre and killing several persons. 
Great rocks came rolling down the mountainside; the cable between 
Fort de France and Santo Domingo parted ; rivers were everywhere 
overflowing their banks ; cinders fell continuously ; the vegetables which 
the market-women brought down from the hills were covered with 
ashes. 

St. Pierre began to lose its nerve. But the optimists asserted that 
the worst was over. A decrease in the fall of cinders on the following 
day seemed to bear out their assertions, though trees were breaking 
under the weight of ashes, and the cable to St. Lucia was disrupted, 






458 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

completely cutting Martinique off from the outside world. The men 
of St. Pierre felt that they could not abandon their affairs for a mere 
display of gigantic fireworks; their families refused to leave husbands 
and fathers for their own selfish safety's sake ; no doubt pride kept 
many of the inhabitants from fleeing. A scientific commission in the 
capital assured the frightened city that it was in no danger whatever — 
scientists have been known to make serious mistakes on similar occa- 
sions. The governor and his wife came to St. Pierre to lend the re- 
assurance of their presence, and the city took on a calmer demeanor 
and went on about its business. 

On the night of May 7 a torrential rain, accompanied by unprece- 
dented thunder and lightning, swept over the island. That, the people 
told themselves, was a sign that the danger was over. The eighth 
dawned fresh and clear. The vapors from the crater went straight 
up and floated away on the trade-wind. The inhabitants forgot their 
fears and began to prepare for a jour de grande fete, for it was 
Ascension Day. Then suddenly, at eight o'clock, two mighty ex- 
plosions that were heard as far off as Dominica and St. Lucia had 
barely subsided when an enormous black cloud with bright streaks in 
it rolled down from the crater at express speed, enveloped St. Pierre, 
halted abruptly a few hundred yards north of the neighboring village 
of Carbet, and floated slowly -away before the wind. The pride of the 
French West Indies, with its twenty-eight thousand inhabitants, had 
been completely wiped out in the space of forty-five seconds. 

That night the wreck of a steamer, its superstructureless deck strewn 
with a score of charred and dismembered bodies, crawled into the 
harbor of St. Lucia. 

" Who are you ? " shouted the crowd gathered on the wharves, " and 
where do you come from ? " 

" We come from hell," shouted back the only surviving officer. 
" You can cable the world that St. Pierre no longer exists." 

Eighteen years have passed since the destruction of St. Pierre, and 
it is still little more than a fishing village. From the waterfront one 
gets an impression of partial recovery; once landed, one finds only a 
fringe of houses along the sea, frail wooden houses with little resem- 
blance to the old stone city. Sloping wharves of stone, strewn with 
broken and rusted lamp-posts, with worthless iron safes, and the twisted 
remnants of anchor chains, accommodate only a few fishing canoes 
instead of their former bustling ocean-going traffic. Back of the one 
partly restored street lies a labyrinth of old, gray cut-stone ruins choked 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 459 

with the rampant vegetation which does its concealing work quickly and 
well in the tropics. From the beach to the sheer green mountain wall 
behind, a dark-gray lava dust everywhere covers the natural soil, and 
from this fertile humus a veritable jungle has sprung up. Former par- 
lors are filled with growing tobacco ; banana plants wave their huge 
leaves from out what were once secluded family residences ; one can get 
lost in the hills of lava, so overgrown are they with forests of brush, 
of manioc, hedgewood, and thorny brambles. The remnants of stone 
walls ready to fall down at the least tremor of the earth force the 
cautious visitor to make many a detour. Here are great stone stair- 
ways that lead nowhere ; there massive buttresses upholding nothing. 
Ivy and climbing plants drape the low jagged walls of former rollicking 
clubs and solemn government buildings. Narrow paths squirm through 
the thorny brush where once were crowded city streets. Of the five 
large churches that adorned St. Pierre, only a piece of the tower, a 
fagment of the curved apse, and a bit of the fagade of the great stone 
cathedral, once among the most important in the West Indies, peer 
above the surrounding vegetation. The entrance hall and the tiles of 
the main aisle lead now to a tiny wood-and-tin church built in the center 
of the former structure. Rusted iron pillars, hanging awry or com- 
pletely fallen, help the brush to choke up the interior; a pathetic old 
iron saint, without head, arms, or feet, leans against the outer wall as 
if he were still dazed by the fall from his niche above. Gaunt black 
pigs roam everywhere through the ruins, the silence of which is seldom 
broken except by the wind whispering through the leaves and the 
murmur of the running water with which the ghost of a city is still 
abundantly supplied. 



A marvelous view of the whole scene may be had from a hill to the 
.south of the amphitheater, where the stone bases of what were evi- 
dently once splendid suburban residences are also choked with brush 
and brambles. From this height the sea is of so transparent a blue 
that one seems to see on its bottom the reflection of the fishing canoes 
scattered about the bay. The single restored street, once the main 
artery, cuts the ruined city in two with a heavy gray line. On either 
side of this is a broken row of houses, some roofed with somber tin, 
others with red tiles that are already beginning to take on the brown- 
ish tint of age. But these few colors, as well as the rare human 
noises that ascend on the breeze, are but slight contrast to the gray 






460 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

lifelessness of all the valley, so funereal in its general aspect that the 
gaily blossoming trees seem strangely out of place in it. There is a 
mild suggestion of Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Peruvian high- 
lands, in this view of ruined St. Pierre, with its countless gray stone 
walls and gables standing forth above the deep green of the vegetation 
that covers all else. The gables stand in almost perfect rows, like the 
headstones of an immense graveyard, so that the little, bare, lava- 
covered cemetery with its tiny white wooden crosses back near the 
foot of the mountain-wall has a pathetic, almost ludicrous aspect, 
like the pretense of cement-made " rustic " furniture, for the whole 
town is one vast cemetery. 

On closer inspection one finds more inhabitants than are suggested 
by the first glimpse. Dozens of drygoods-box shacks are hidden away 
in the lee of towering stone walls that seem on the very point of 
toppling over. Hovels of grass and thatch come suddenly to light as 
one scrambles through the jungles of former palace courtyards and 
lava-razed fortresses. The buoyant faith and trust of humanity laughs 
in the end at such catastrophes even as that of St. Pierre. We halted 
to talk with some of the denizens of these improvised homes among 
the ruins. An old negro and his wife in one of them had lost their 
four children in the disaster. The woman had been sent by her 
mistress on an errand into the country an hour before it occurred; 
the man had seen a long row of peasants bound for market killed up to 
within a few feet of where he was working on the roadside, and a 
stone had fallen upon his back, crippling him for life. Yet a few 
years later they had returned to build their shelter on the very spot 
where their children had fallen. 

" We could n't stand it in Fort de France," explained the old man. 
'• It was always raining, stinking, full of mud and fever." As a mat- 
ter of fact, there is scarcely an iota of difference in climate between the 
two cities, but homesickness easily gives false impressions. 

If St. Pierre is not yet rebuilt, it is not because of fear, but by rea- 
son of the fact that only a scattered handful of its inhabitants were left 
alive. In the city itself there was one survivor, a negro prisoner con- 
fined in a deep dungeon from which he was rescued four days later. 
Only those who chanced to be away from home or in the far outskirts 
outlived that fateful May morning. Yet already it has several dis- 
tilleries, half a dozen schools, a post-office and telephone station, a 
gendarmerie, and two or three makeshift hotels. The inhabitants 
are more kindly, soft-mannered beings than those of the capital, as if 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 461 

the disaster had tamed their souls. But even they are beginning 
to demand the restoration of their city to the rank of a municipality. 
At present it is not even a commune, but a suburban dependency of the 
neighboring village of Carbet. Its streets are unlighted at night; five 
hundred market women crowd the little Place Bertin daily in blazing 
sunshine or drenching rain, for lack of a covered market. Only by 
its re-creation into a separate municipality, insist its inhabitants, will 
these things and many like them be remedied; and once they are, 
St. Pierre will begin to take on its old importance and grow rich and 
prosperous once more. Meanwhile old Pelee, cold and inexorable, 
sloping majestically upward from the blue Caribbean in broken, 
wrinkled, treeless, brown grandeur, seems to look down upon the 
optimistic little creatures at his feet with a grim, sardonic smile. 

I set out to climb the volcano that afternoon, halting at Morne Rouge 
for the night. From St. Pierre a good highway climbs abruptly into 
the hills, along the lava cliffs of the Riviere Blanche, once seething 
with boiling mud, now glass-clear again, with washerwomen toiling 
here and there along its banks. During the eruption, the first visitors 
ifter it ceased assure us, blocks of lava a hundred cubic meters in size 
[vere thrown out by the monster, and the tropical rains falling on these 
j-ed-hot ingots produced all manner of violent phenomena. To-day 
[:hese giant blocks are broken up into far smaller masses, or have dis- 
integrated entirely into lava soil of great fertility. Forty square miles 
jvere utterly devastated on that May morning, not a living thing re- 
maining within that area. But if nature destroys in one swift flare, 
[t also reconstructs quickly in these tropical regions. Lava valleys 
full of waving bamboos, cliffs lined with splendid tree-ferns, patches 
[if sugar-cane stretching up the steep slopes seemed to belie the story 
bf destruction, while swarms of children about the frequent huts, 
jnany of the boys in poilu caps, the gay little girls with frizzled tresses, 
iometimes covered with replica of their mothers' gay turbans, showed 
that even mankind was recovering from the devastation. For the 
I race suicide " of continental France is not duplicated in her West 
indian colonies. 

i Morne Rouge sits on a ridge of one of the great buttresses that 
. phold Pelee, towering 4429 feet above the Caribbean, with dimen- 
sions not unsimilar to those of Vesuvius. It, too, was destroyed, 
hough some months later than St. Pierre, but many of its inhabitants 

)ok warning in time and have returned to reconstruct the place to 



462 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

almost what it was before. By some miracle, according to the French 
parish priest with whom I spent the night, its huge church all but 
escaped damage, and only the cross on its spire, still tipsy after eigh- 
teen years, recalls the ordeal through which it passed. Wild be- 
gonias and many flowering shrubs give the scattered town the air of 
a semi-tropical garden, and the spreading view of the Caribbean, al- 
ready far below, enhances the beauty of its situation. 

The ascent of Pelee is neither dangerous nor particularly difficult 
for an experienced pedestrian. If I accepted the guidance of " Pat- 
rice," at the curate's suggestion, it was rather because of the weather 
than for any other reason. The morning was gloomy, with heavy, 
intermittent showers, and the dense clouds that covered all the upper 
half of the volcano made it unlikely that a stranger could follow un- 
assisted the path to the summit, though on a clear day there would 
have been no difficulty. It was so cold that I shivered visibly in my 
summer garb. Negroes in bare feet but wrapped to the ears in heavy 
poiln overcoats, squatted in the doors of their huts along the highway 
we followed for several miles farther. Then we struck upward 
through steeply sloping fields, already soaked from hat to shoes by 
the drenching downpours that soon became one continual deluge. As 
a matter of fact, " Patrice " did not boast the latter article of dress, 
which made it easier for him to cling to the narrow path down which 
poured a veritable brook. But he was more than once for turning 
back, and only the fear of what my host of the night might say if 
he abandoned a " helpless stranger who had been put in his special 
charge " urged him on. " Patrice " was three-fourths negro, — what 
the Haitians call a griff e and the Martiniquais a capre, — but somehow 
one did not think of his color, possibly because, like many of the French 
islanders, he seemed to be almost unconscious of it himself, and he 
had not a trace of that mixture of aggressiveness and obsequiousness 
of our own and the British blacks. His mind was a curious con- 
glomeration of learning, picked up heaven knows where, and patches 
of the most astonishing ignorance, but he knew Pelee as a child knows 
its own back-yard. 

This was fortunate, for it was a day in which it would have been 
more than easy to go astray. Only once or twice in the ascent did 
the fog lift, giving a glimpse of both the Atlantic and the Caribbean, 
of Morne Rouge half hidden in its verdure, and the green-gray site 
of what was once St. Pierre. Great fields of tree-ferns, whole moun- 
tainsides of them, showed in these brief intervals of visibility, with 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 463 

deeply wooded valleys and steep peaks and ridges entirely covered 
with vegetation ; nowhere the bare rocks and patches of lava I had 
expected. Mountain " raspberries," the same inviting but rather taste- 
less fruit which the Porto Ricans miscall fresas, lined the way almost 
to the summit, enticing us to halt and eat regardless of the downpour. 
Once during the last sheer miles we had a brief view of the rim of the 
crater, like the edge of a world broken off by some cataclysm of the 
solar system. But when we had surmounted this and paused on the 
brink, there was nothing to be seen except an immense void filled 
with swirling white mist. 

" Patrice " knew the value of patience, however, and for a long 
shivering hour we waited. Then all at once the cloud-curtain was 
snatched away for the briefest instant, and at our feet lay, not the 
quarry-like crater of the imagination, but a great valley filled with 
a scrub vegetation which might have been duplicated in the highlands 
of Scotland. Across it, like a mammoth monument, the " needle " 
that marks the summit, in the new form which the latest eruption 
left it, stood out against the sky a mere rifle-shot away. Then the 
mists swept in again, as if nature were some busy caretaker who had 
little time to waste on mere sight-seers, and left us to find our way 
as best we could out of the little cell-like chamber of fog in which 
we were inclosed. 

We descended by a path that " Patrice " knew, even in the clouds, 
to the bottom of the crater. Gigantic rocks of every possible form lay 
tumbled everywhere, but so completely were they covered with light 
vegetation that only this closer view revealed their existence. Here 
and there was a fumerole, or smoke-hole, from which issued light 
clouds of vapor indistinguishable, except in temperature, from the 
swirling mists in which they were quickly merged. We crawled into 
one of these, half-covered with a hoodlike boulder, and at once lost the 
chill that had pervaded our very bones. The vent was like some mam- 
moth chimney-corner, with a damp, sulphurous heat which quickly 
induced sleepiness and a desire to stretch out and let the world be- 
low go hang. That and the bottle of syrupy Martinique rum which 
Patrice " had been f oresighted enough to bring with him allayed any 
fear of mishap from exposure, and we ate our lunch in as homelike 
comfort as if the wintry winds and pouring rain outside were a thou- 
sand leagues distant. 

The descent was swifter than we would have had it, thanks to the 
rain-soaked slopes, and almost before I realized it we were down in 



464 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the brilliant tropical sunshine again, great clumps of bamboos casting 
a welcome shade over the ever more level trail and the mountainsides 
of tree-ferns again high above us. At Ajoupa Bouillon (ajoupa, a hast- 
ily constructed shelter, is one of the few Carib words which has sur- 
vived) we rejoined the highway and parted company, " Patrice " dubi- 
ous of a " helpless stranger's " ability to find his way, even along a 
public road. But as I showed no inclination to add another five-franc 
note to his unusual day's income for being piloted to the north coast, 
he took his leave with a doleful countenance and pattered away in the 
direction of Morne Rouge. 

Everything I wore or carried was still dripping wet. I turned 
aside into the first open meadow and spread out all of which I could 
in decency divest myself, the blazing sunshine drying it with magical 
rapidity. One felt immensely more of a sense of civilization here than 
in Haiti. There a lone white man would have hesitated to lie down 
beside the highway, even had there been one. Here one seemed as 
secure as in the heart of France. Yet there was little outward dif- 
ference between the Haitians and the simple, kindly country-people 
who plodded constantly past, the women carrying big bundles on their 
heads. The hats they secured by laying the load over one rim flapping 
behind them, balancing their burdens with a cadenced swing of the 
hips, their legs bare to the knees. The men were fewer and seldom 
carried anything. In the fields were flocks of cattle ; the little houses 
were all built close to the road, for cacos are unknown in Martinique. 
Vehicles were few despite the excellence of the leisurely French high- 
way. The great mass of the islanders do their traveling on foot, the 
wealthy by automobile ; but the latter are not numerous enough to give 
the pedestrian much annoyance. 

As I neared the coast, the rolling hills turned to cane-fields, stretch- 
ing clear down to the edge of the Atlantic. Compared with Cuba or 
Porto Rico, the methods were primitive, or more exactly, diminutive. 
Children, women, and old men picked up the cut canes, one by one, tied 
them in bundles with the top leaves, and slowly carried them to small 
ox-carts in which they were laboriously stood on end, bundle by bundle. 
These workers received two francs a day — fifteen cents at the then rate 
of exchange. Men in the prime of life were paid four francs fifty 
centimes for such work as hoeing or transferring the ox-cart loads into 
the little four-wheeled railroad cars which bore them away to the fac- ■• 





a 
< 




The shops of Martinique are sometimes as gaily garbed as the women 




Empress Josephine was born where this house stands 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 465 

tory. Cane-cutters, however, working by the tache, earned as much as 
twelve francs a day. 

Unlike the smaller British islands, the French Antilles have not 
put all their faith in sugar. Cane products, however, form by far 
the most important industry. If their exports of sugar decreased by 
half during the war, it is because the making of rum proved more 
advantageous, especially as France requisitioned their sugar at less 
than half the price in the open market. In the very years when the 
United States was adopting its prohibition amendment, Martinque and 
Guadeloupe increased their rum production by some forty per cent. 
The present almost unprecedented prosperity of the islands is mainly 
due to the distilled cane juice they sent overseas while their 1 sons were 
battling at the front. But here, too, there are loud protests at the in- 
equality of distribution of that prosperity. Three-fourths of the is- 
land, the Martiniquais complain, belongs to five families, of pure 
French blood, who intermarry among themselves, keeping the estates 
and the chief usines in a sort of closed corporation. If a bit of land 
is offered for sale, the complaint continues, these families bid it in at 
any price demanded in order to freeze out " les petits." The fact that 
the latter may also be white men does not alter the attitude of the 
monopolists. Moreover, the small planter is ruthlessly exploited by 
the large distillers, who pay him fifty to sixty francs a ton for his 
cane and sell their rum at seven francs a liter. One finds, therefore, 
among the middle-class whites a considerable number of still patriotic 
but disgruntled citizens. 

A little story which was going the rounds during our stay in Mar- 
tinique shows that the game of " high finance " can be played even on 
a twenty by forty mile island. A " high yellow " native who had 
never been credited with extraordinary intelligence " cleaned up " three 
million francs during the last year of the war by the following simple 
little scheme. France decreed that the freight rate between Mar- 
tinique and French ports should be three hundred francs a ton. The 
ships secretly refused space at that price. The " high yellow " in- 
dividual entered into a private agreement with the steamship companies 
to pay the price asked, 1200 francs a ton. While his competitors were 
complaining that they could not ship, this man's rum was being carried 
to Europe, where it was sold at a high price, but not one at which, 
his rivals pointed out to one another, he could make any profit at such 
exorbitant freight rates. The man persisted, however, paying for. 



466 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

each shipment by check as soon as it was landed. With the last barrels 
he, too, went to France. There he wrote a polite note to the steamship 
company, requesting that he be refunded the nine hundred francs a 
ton he had paid over the legal rate. The company laughed loudly at 
his colonial naivete. He put his check stubs in the hands of a lawyer, 
and, to cut short the story, the company suddenly recognized the bitter 
truth in the assertion that he who laughs last shows superior mirth. 

I halted that night in Lorrain, on the edge of a small bay with 
precipitous shores into which the Atlantic threshed constantly, and 
next morning caught the lumbering auto de poste, having had the fore- 
sight to reserve a place in it some days earlier. Even though we 
clung to the coast, the road climbed continuously over the buttresses of 
the central mountain chain, for these smaller West Indian islands have 
virtually no real flat lands. From the tops of the higher ridges we 
could plainly make out Dominica on the horizon behind us. Some of 
the hillsides were built up in terraced gardens, though without stone 
facings, in which grew among other favorite native vegetables, gname, 
as Martinique calls the malanga of Cuba or the poi or taro of the 
South Seas. The chauffeur had small respect for any possible nerves 
among the passengers, and tore about the constant curves and incessant 
ups and downs of the ridge-braced coast as if speed were far more 
essential than ultimate arrival. The coast-line, ragged as a shattered 
panel, with pretty, old-as-France towns nestled in each scolloped bay, 
presented many a beautiful vista. Here and there we crossed a little 
cane railroad, some of the fields that fed them so precipitous that the 
bundles of cane were shot down across the ravines on wire trolleys. 
At Trinite, with its long peninsula stretching far out into the Atlantic, 
we turned inland and climbed quickly into the hills. Here there 
were a few Chinese and Hindu features, but the overwhelming ma- 
jority were negroes, though full-blooded Africans were almost rare. 
The Frenchman is inclined to overlook the matter of color in his at- 
tachments, with the result that mulattoes are much more numerous in 
the French than in the British islands. There is a great difference, too, 
in what might be called public discipline. To cite one of many ex- 
amples : one of our fellow-passengers crowded into the coach with an 
immense plate-glass mirror without a frame. A mishap at any of the 
sharp turns or steep descents might easily have shattered it and seri- 
ously injured the score of persons huddled within the vehicle. But 
though the one white traveler besides myself kept repeating during all 
the rest of the journey, "Mais c'cst excessivement dangcrcux," the mir- 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 467 

ror remained. In the British islands the mere attempt to enter a 
public vehicle with such an object would probably have resulted in a 
solemn case in a magistrate's court that same morning. Near Gros 
Morne were several hills completely covered with pineapples, the 
cultivators climbing along the rows as up and down a ladder. Then 
suddenly we came out high above the great bay of Fort de France, the 
square chimneys of a dozen rum asines dotting the almost flat lands 
about it, and descended quickly through ever more populous villages 
to the capital. 

I returned to St. Pierre one morning for a walk through the heart 
of the island. An excellent road in rather bad repair unites the ruined 
city and the capital, a distance of tweny-five miles. It climbs quickly 
into beautiful, cool, green mountains. When one says mountains in 
the West Indies the word must be taken with a rather diminutive mean- 
ing, for though they are real mountains in formation, and sometimes in 
massiveness, the greater part of them is under water. Old sugar 
estates dating from the high-priced Napoleonic days, with half per- 
pendicular cane-fields, surrounded the first few steep kilometers. Then 
the ascent grew more leisurely, though it mounted steadily for some 
three hours up the valley of the Carbet. If one was to believe the 
French guidebook in my pocket, I was engaged in a perilous under- 
taking. 

" One must remember," it warned, " that Martinique is a tropical 
country, and the act of exposing oneself to climbing a slope on foot or 
of blowing up a bicycle tire, even in the shade" — the paragraph 
was addressed to cyclists, for the writer would never have suspected 
a visitor to Martinique of deliberately turning pedestrian — " is danger- 
ous. A tropical helmet," he asserted on another page, " and a flannel 
stomach-band are indispensable." How I have succeeded in covering 
many thousand miles of the tropics on foot without harnessing myself 
up in those indispensable contrivances is, no doubt, a mystery. As a 
matter of fact, the chatter of sedentary imaginations aside, tramping 
is no more risky in the West Indies than in the midsummer Cat- 
skills. 

During the first few miles I met many fierce-looking mulattoes in 
flaring piratical mustaches and kinky Napoleon III beards, carrying 
in their hands big, sharp-pointed cane-knives, but every passer-by bade 
me a soft, kindly, respectful " Bonjour, monsieur " ; they had not even 
the hypocritical obsequiousness or the occasional insolence of the Brit- 



468 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ish negro. Beyond Fond St. Denis the way descended somewhat along 
another beautiful valley, its slopes densely wooded, a small river boil- 
ing over the rocks at its bottom. The Pitons du Carbet bulked majest- 
ically into the sky overhead ; a lower peak between them was completely 
covered with tree-ferns. Then the highway began to mount again, dis- 
closing magnificent new panoramas at every turn. It was a soft- 
footed road, and in these higher reaches almost entirely untraveled. 
The rich center of the island was surprisingly uninhabited. The un- 
failing trade-wind swept down through the mountain passes to the 
left; hurrying clouds broke the fury of the tropical sun; there was 
splendid drinking water everywhere, usually carried out to the edge 
of the road in bamboo troughs stuck into the sheer mountain-side. The 
climb ended at two huts and a shrine, dignified with the name of Deux 
Choux, whence another highway descended to Robert, on the Atlantic. 
My own paused for a marvelous view back down the dense green 
valley to cloud-capped Pelee and a broad stretch of the Caribbean be- 
yond St. Pierre, then came out on a tiny meadow with grazing cattle, 
a lonely little hut, and a temperate climate. A wonderfully symmetrical 
green peak stood directly overhead, with another, its summit lost in 
the clouds, breaking the horizon beyond. Martinique, one was forced 
to admit, was as beautiful in its small way as Porto Rico, even though 
it lacks the red-leafed bucare, the color-splashes of orange-trees, and 
the snow-like tobacco-fields. A deep stillness reigned, emphasized 
rather than broken by the murmur of some distant little stream, the 
creaking of an insect far off in the wilderness, now and then a gust of 
wind which set the ferns and the bamboo plumes to whispering to- 
gether. Once I thought I heard a groan, but it proved to be only the 
native boute I was smoking, struggling for air. Little wooden shrines 
were here and there set into the mountain walls, the garments of the 
dolls they inclosed tattered and weather-rotted. 

Some eight miles from the capital a gap in the hills gave a wide- 
spreading view of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and all the southern half 
of Martinique, tumbled, mottled by sunshine and cloud shadows, more 
brown than this central region, the three little islands that mark the 
birthplace of a French empress dotting the dense-blue bay. Houses 
and people began to appear again, happy-go-lucky little huts, though 
with far more pride in their appearance than those of Haiti ; then 
came the " summer villas " of the wealthier citizens of Fort de France, 
until the road became one long suburb. A branch to the right de- 
scended to the hot baths of Absalon ; farther on another pitched down- 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 469 

ward to those of Didier, both at the bottom of an immense cleft in the 
hills, and an hour later I was plodding through the hot, dusty, crowded 
streets of gaily-turbanned Fort de France. 

The people of the French Antilles have many of the characteristics 
of the continental Frenchman. His faults and his virtues are theirs, 
the former magnified, the latter shrunken, as is the way with the negro. 
In outward demeanor they have little in common with the British West 
Indian, still less perhaps with our own blacks. They are much less 
given to outbursts of insolence and are more courteous. But, like the 
Frenchman, they are impulsive and individualistic, hence one cannot 
generalize too broadly. I have met some of the most genuinely cour- 
teous persons in " French America," mulattoes, capres, and even full 
negroes, with the outward evidences of a culture superior to that of 
any but our best class ; I have met others who made me temporarily a 
firm believer in the righteousness of Judge Lynch. The former were 
decidedly in the majority ; there were many who were rather over polite. 
But, like that of the French, their politeness is individual, never col- 
lective. After being treated with incredible courtesy by the few with 
whom one has come into personal contact, one is astounded to find 
the crowds almost brutal. The country people are, of course, more 
courteous than the corresponding classes in the capital ; the women 
are, on the whole, less so than the men, another direct legacy from the 
French. The islanders have, too, something of that French custom of 
not showing surprise at strange sights or personal idiosyncrasies, that 
same quality that makes it so easy to live in Paris. A white man on 
foot, for instance, rarely seems to attract even a passing attention ; in 
the British islands he is the constant butt of inquiry, comment, and 
crude attempts at ridicule, though he is an equally unusual sight in 
either group of islands. All these things are visibly the result of 
environment and the negro's monkey-like faculty for imitation. From 
the capre up he takes on certain other qualities from his white parents, 
though they seldom equal the original. The one pleasant trait native 
to the negro — his gaiety and lack of gloom — is tempered in the French 
islands by a sort of Latin pensiveness, while his sense of personal dig- 
nity is distinctly higher than that among the former British slaves. 

His superiority to the Haitian is ample proof of the advantage of 
having the negro ruled over by whites, even though that rule be faulty, 
instead of letting him run wild. He has more sense of responsibility, 
more industry, and a civic spirit which the Haitian has almost com- 



470 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

pletely lost. All this tends to make him comparatively law-abiding. 
There are few country police in the French islands, and they are not 
numerous in the towns, yet the stranger may wander at will and 
rarely meet even with annoyance. Barrels of rum are left unguarded 
for weeks in the streets or on the wharves of Guadeloupe or Martin- 
ique, and the case is almost unknown of their being broached or in any 
way molested. Even our own land scarcely aspires to that high 
standard. White women may go freely anywhere with far less likeli- 
hood of meeting with disrespect than in many Caucasian lands. 

The French negro's superiority of deportment is partly due, no 
doubt, to the higher sense of equality he enjoys under the tricolor. The 
color line exists, but it is less direct, less tangible, more hidden than 
with us. When the white inhabitants speak of it at all it is apt to be 
in whispers. " Creoles " shake hands with, and show all the outward 
signs of friendship to their colored neighbors ; bi-colored functions, 
business partnerships between the two races are common, yet the 
whites avoid social mixture as far as they dare. I say " dare " because 
that is exactly the word which seems to fit the case. The French ap- 
pear to have a certain fear of their negroes, if not actual physical 
fear, at least a disinclination to show them discourtesy by referring to 
the matter of color. In fact, the colored population may be said to 
have the upper hand. The laws of the islands are made in France, 
but each of them sends a senator and two deputies to Paris, and equal 
suffrage gives the whites small chance of winning these offices; they 
have still less of being elected to municipal and colonial councils. 

" It was a great mistake to give the negroes the vote," more than 
one white islander assured me, in an undertone, " for it leaves us 
whites swamped beneath them. With negroes voting, justice goes 
almost invariably to the man who is a friend of the depute, and the 
latter is never white." 

" Our colored population should be handled with a firm hand," said 
a white colonial from the island of St. Martin, " but of course you 
cannot expect the French to do that." 

Fortunately for the whites, there is a considerable amount of fric- 
tion between the negroes and the " gens de couleur," and the blacks are 
often more friendly to the Caucasian element than to those partly of 
their own race. 

Even the " creole " of the islands under French rule is more orderly 
than that of Haiti. A knowledge of French is sufficient to carry on 
conversation with all classes, though the language of the masses falls 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 471 

far. short of Parisian perfection. Curious local expressions are numer- 
ous. " Li " means either il y a or il est; the banana we know is a 
" gro' femme," the tiny ones which seldom reach our markets are 
" fignes naines" — literally "dwarf figs." "Who" becomes "Qui 
monde," an improvement at least over the " Qui monde qa" of Haiti. 
Innumerable localisms of this kind, added to a slovenly pronuncia- 
tion, make the popular tongue difficult for the stranger, but at least he 
is not called upon to guess the meaning of scores of terms from the 
African dialects such as pepper the Haitian jargon. 

Though French money is current, Guadeloupe and Martinique issue 
notes of their own of from five francs upward. As these look exactly 
alike, except for the name of the island printed upon them, yet are not 
mutually accepted, the inexperienced traveler is sometimes put to con- 
siderable annoyance. Nominally, prices are now almost as high as 
in the United States, but the present low rate of exchange makes liv- 
ing agreeably low for the foreigner. " Telegrams " turned in at a 
post-office are telephoned to any part of the island in which they 
originate, with un-Latin despatch, at the slight cost of fifty centimes 
(four cents at the present exchange) for twenty words. There is 
no cable service, however, between the two islands, which have less 
intercourse with each other than with the mother country. 

Schools are closely centralized, as in France, and not particularly 
numerous or effective, though there is less illiteracy than the census of 
the French islanders who helped to dig the Panama Canal seemed to 
indicate. Among the surprises in store for the visitor is the profound 
patriotism of almost all classes. Twenty thousand Martiniquais went 
to France as conscripts, while the British West Indies sent only volun- 
teers, yet only one British island can in any way compare with their 
French neighbors in loyalty to the homeland. Thus is France rewarded 
for the comparative equality which she grants her subjects, irrespec- 
tive of color. While the British segregated their West Indian troops 
into the separate regiments, with white officers over them and only the 
non-commissioned ranks open to soldiers of color, France mixed hers 
in with the poilus, and gave them equal chances of promotion. More 
than one black French colonel held important posts during the war. 
Incidentally, by this intermingling she got considerable fight out of 
her black troops, which can scarcely be said of the " B. W. I." regi- 
ments. This policy, carried out with what to us would be too thorough 
an indifference to the racial problem, has at least given her " Ameri- 
can " subjects a great loyalty and love for France. 



472 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

The nearest approach to a railroad station in Martinique is a street 
beside the post-office in the capital. There, at half -past two each after- 
noon, three autos de poste set out for as many extremities of the island. 
A throng of would-be travelers, several times larger than the snort- 
ing old busses can accommodate, forms a whirlpool of gay calicos, 
multifarious bundles, and sputtering patois, in which a lone white man 
seems strangely out of place. The distribution of tickets is somewhat 
disorderly, as one might expect, and when the vehicles chug away 
with their full, cramped quota, they are followed by angry shrieks and 
gestures from the disappointed. The wealthy few of these hurry out 
to the edge of the savane to bargain for private cars, while the majority 
trudge homeward, hoping that the morrow will bring better luck, or 
wrath fully set out on foot for their destinations. 

I won a place one afternoon in the bus for Ste. Anne, thirty-five 
miles away on the southern point of the island. The region proved 
more rolling, less broken by abrupt hills, than the central portion. 
Old kettles scattered here and there, the ruins of a few windmill- 
towers and ivy-grown brick chimneys showed that Martinique, too, 
had gone through a certain process of centralization in her principal 
industry. The sense of smell demonstrated that the larger and rarer 
usines we passed gave their attention rather to rum than to sugar. 
Beyond Petit Bourg the plains bordering Fort de France Bay gave 
way to a wilder landscape, with a rich red soil and many by no means 
perfect roads in every direction. The turban-coiffed women and bare- 
foot countrymen tramping them had no such fear of the automobile 
as their Haitian cousins, but yielded the road to it with a sort of 
lofty disdain. Everywhere men and women were working side by 
side in the cane-fields, which filled each suggestion of valley and cov- 
ered the lower slopes about it. The appearance of the soil and the 
short joints of the canes suggested that this southern region needed 
irrigation. Farther on came several precipices and immense ravines, 
the mountains sprinkled far and wide with huts and little cultivated 
fields which the irregularity of the ground gave every conceivable 
shape. Many of the mountaineers, according to a fellow-passenger, 
own their farms, those far back in the hills being mainly engaged 
in the cultivation of cacao. We passed half a dozen populous towns 
on the way, that of Riviere Pilote in a setting of enormous black 
boulders which carried the mind back to Namur in Belgium. A thorny, 
half-arid vegetation stretched from there all the way to the petrified 
forest and salt ponds on the southernmost point of the island. 




Cm 
'%■ 







The Cathedral of St. Pierre 




The present residents of St. Pierre tuck their houses into the corners of old stone ruins 



RAMBLES IN MARTINIQUE 473 

Ste. Anne is a thatch-roofed little village of perhaps a hundred 
inhabitants, yet these included at least four grands blesses, cripples 
from the far off battle-line in France. One blind youth, whose poilu 
cap looked pale above his ebony face, sat playing a broken violin behind 
the little hut in which he was born. Yet he would gladly go again, he 
asserted, if " our dear France " needed him. Another wore the khaki 
overseas cap marked " 321 U. S." he had picked up on the battlefield 
the day he lost his leg. The policeman who gave me a shake-down 
in the hut from which he ruled the community insisted on showing me 
all six of the scars which decorated his black body, while his female 
companion displayed the fragments of shrapnel that had inflicted them, 
precious relics which she kept in a broken pitcher. He was still fight- 
ing the war over again when I fell asleep. Simple-hearted, obliging 
negroes, the citizens of Ste. Anne evidently saw a white man so seldom 
that they were scarcely aware of the existence of the troublesome 
" color line." 

On my return, I dropped off at Petit Bourg and walked out to the 
village of Trois Islets. A mile beyond it, back in a pretty little hol- 
low in the hills, are the ruins of the overseer's house in which Josephine, 
once Empress of the French, was born. The walls of the stone build- 
ing where her parents lived until a hurricane destroyed it just before 
her birth, can still be traced ; the kitchen behind it serves to this day 
the mulatto family that has built a smaller dwelling on the same site. 
Farther back in the valley, half hidden by tropical brush and clumps 
of bamboo, are the roofless remains of her father's sugar-mill — or, 
more likely, rum plant — where she lived until the age of fifteen. Its 
square brick chimney still peers above the encroaching vegetation. A 
long line of women were hoeing the cane on a steep hillside across the 
brook, their multicolored garments standing out against the Nile-green 
background, snatches of the falsetto song with which they cheer one 
another on at their labors drifting by on the trade wind - — just such a 
scene, perhaps, as Josephine herself had known so well in her girlhood. 

Marie Josephine Rose Tascher de la Pagerie was first married to 
the Vicomte de Beauharnais, son of a governor of Martinique. Her 
mother lies buried in the parish church of Trois Islets, on a little knoll 
overlooking the three tiny islands which give the place its name. A 
stone set into the interior wall of the modest plaster and red-tiled build- 
ing informs all who care to read : 



474 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Ci Git 

L'Augnste Madame 

Rose Claire Duverger de Sanois 

Veuve de Messire J. G. Tascher 

de LA PAGERIE 

Merede SA MAJESTfi 

L'IMPERATRICE 

des FRANCAIS 

Decedee le 2 Juin 1807 

a l'age de 71 ans 

Munie des sacrements de 

L'EGLISE 

But neither the old municipal secretary who takes it upon himself 
to have a lunch prepared in the municipal building for all " distin- 
guished visitors" — thereby adding generously to his stipend — nor 
the dwarfish priest in his garden-framed residence behind the church 
was interested in Napoleonic history. Their problems were more 
modern. 

" How can a man live," they condoled with each other, while I 
studied the decorations of the priestly parlor, " with rum advanced 
from fifty centimes to six francs a liter? " 

Women carrying sewer-pipes and bricks on their heads had loaded 
the " canoe " which carries the mails daily from Trois Islets to the 
capital across the bay until its gunwales were barely visible above the 
water. When a dozen negro passengers and sailors had added their 
weight to this imminent possibility of disaster, we were rowed out be- 
yond the islets, where the captain of the trusting contrivance stood for 
some time at the bow blowing on a conch-shell for the wind that at 
length saw fit to waft us safely across to Fort de France. 



CHAPTER XX 

ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN 

THE Dutch possessions in the West Indies consist of six islands 
in two widely separated groups. Curacao, Bonaire, and 
Aruba lie just off the coast of Venezuela ; Saba, St. Eustatius, 
and St. Martin are scattered among the British islands hundreds of 
miles to the north. A colonial government for all of them sits in 
Willemsted, chief and only city of Curacao, and spreads its feelers of 
red tape to each small dependency and back to the Netherlands. Fifty- 
seven thousand people live in the four hundred square miles of these 
little dots on the blue sea, but there is a sharp line of demarkation be- 
tween the two groups, Dutch though they both are in nationality. The 
inhabitants of the southern islands are mainly Venezuelan in origin and 
Roman Catholic in faith ; they speak a manufactured language called 
Papiamento, without syntax or grammar, and made up of Spanish, 
Dutch, English, and African words, an unintelligible jargon with a 
teasing way of now and then throwing in a recognizable word or 
phrase. Those of the northern group are English-speaking and over- 
whelmingly Protestant. Of them all Curacao is by far the most im- 
portant, and the oldest of Holland's present colonies. But the mother 
country rates her scattered islands in the Caribbean of slight importance 
in comparison with her newer and far larger possessions in the East, 
Java, Sumatra, and Borneo ; while even Surinam on the coast of Brazil, 
with its extensive river system, its gold, and its fertile soil, means more 
to the Dutchman than all the rest of his colonies in the New World. 

We sailed for Curacao late in April. The Caribbean was glaringly 
blue under the brilliant sun, the trade-wind persistently astern. On the 
way we passed not only Bonaire and Aruba, dismal-looking mounds of 
earth partly covered with half-hearted vegetation, with Margarita, 
jagged-topped and sand-bordered, surrounded by a strip of light tur- 
quoise water which seemed to add attraction to its name and typify its 
tropicality, and Tortuga, low and featureless, melting into the distant 
horizon. These last two belong to Venezuela, the fifth and last of the 
nations with possessions in the Caribbean. Early next morning we 

475 



476 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

were awakened by the blowing of the steamer's siren as a signal to 
Curasao to open the pontoon bridge across its narrow entrance, and, 
gliding into the bluest of lagoons, wound a mile or more up into the 
country before turning around and returning to the dock. As in Bar- 
bados, one was struck by the brilliancy of the atmosphere, the lack of 
restful shade. What trees there were looked dry and scraggly, the 
country-side was everywhere dead brown, arid, and bare, except for 
great clumps of organ cactus. A road or two wandered away over the 
little hills, only one of which could be called so much as a peak, a tele- 
graph line of several wires following the best of them, though there is 
no other town than the capital on the island. One wondered why this 
barren reef is so thickly peopled, or inhabited at all, how even the few 
goats in sight find sustenance. Here and there were a few windmills, 
behaving with strict Dutch propriety for all the brisk trade-wind. 
These, and the irrigation they supply, accounted for the few tiny oases 
one could make out in the dreary landscape. Yet the island is un- 
usually healthful ; with ten days' rain a year few microbes can live, and 
the constant breeze relieves in a measure the heat of the equatorial sun. 
Ships tie up to the docks in Willemsted, which is more often known 
by the name of the island itself, yet such is the formation of these that 
one must take a punt ashore, or save ten Dutch cents by swinging down 
the rope ladder. Negroes were languidly sculling about the densely 
blue harbor, using the Dutch canalboat style of a single heavy oar over 
the stern of the boat, and swaying their bodies as slowly back and forth 
as if their vocabularies did not include the word for haste. The town 
crowds eagerly about the harbor entrance, looking almost miniature 
from the deck of the towering British freighter. The houses, distinctly 
Dutch in architecture despite their patently tropical aspect, are well 
built, rarely of wood, most of them being faced with cement or plaster, 
all brightly colored, with red or reddish-brown tile roofs, and cornices 
of contrasting shades, causing them to stand out across the indigo lagoon 
like the figures on stained glass windows. Now and again the bridge 
connecting the two halves of the town broke in twain and left a motley 
throng gathered at each of its entrances. When it was joined together 
again the procession across it formed a veritable chain of human beings. 
The one thing that can induce the people of Curasao to hurry is the 
signal for the opening of its bridge. Then from both directions comes 
the scurrying of mainly bare feet, jet-black women with great baskets 
on their heads dart in and out among those racing from the opposite 
shore, automobiles honk their way even faster, scattering the pedestrians 



ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN 477 

in two furrows on each side, despite the warning placard in Dutch and 
Papiamento to " Zeer Langsam Ryden " or " Kore Poko Poko." One 
may, to be sure, take a punt across, but that costs ten cents, whereas 
the bridge fare is one cent if barefoot, two if shod, all of course in 
Dutch currency, and the whistle of an arriving or departing steamer is 
sure to cause a portion of the population momentarily to throw off its 
lethargy. 

The people of Curaqao are less annoying than the majority of those 
in the smaller islands of the Caribbean. It may be the proverbial Dutch 
thrift which keeps the town cleaner and more orderly. The children 
do not beg, the adults appear occupied with their own affairs, and 
though the population is overwhelmingly negro, the impudence fre- 
quently met with elsewhere is not much in evidence. They are amus- 
ingly stolid negroes, with staid Dutch airs, as solemn the week round as 
their British brethren on the Sabbath, without a suggestion of the chic 
air of the French islanders. Unshaved Hollanders, with faces like 
yellow old parchment, wearing the heavy uniforms of their homeland 
and carrying short swords, mingle with the black throng, but are rarely 
called upon to exercise their authority. Dutch high officials, in more 
resplendent uniforms, dash by in fine automobiles as if bent on running 
down the people they have been sent to govern. 

Curaqao is a free port, though this does not tend to lower its prices, 
and trade is its chief, almost its only, raison d'etre. The clerks in the 
stores glibly quote American prices to American travelers, but they are 
soon out of their depth in English. Many of them can converse fluently 
in Spanish, but the rank and file knows nothing but Papiamento, and is 
astoundingly voluble in that. Or it may be that the chattering sounded 
more noisy because it was unintelligible, for though any one knowing 
Spanish can catch the drift of a conversation in the native jargon, it 
is quite another matter to understand it. The men coaling ship were 
constantly singsonging it, but little more than the rhythm was com- 
prehensible, though now and then a familiar word burst out clearly, like 
the face of a friend in a strange crowd. Old women seated in their 
doorways or on the ground in a patch of shade, weaving coarse hats 
from the bundles of Venezuelan " straw " which small boys brought 
them on their heads, chattered ceaselessly in Papiamento even in the 
hottest hours of the day. Stolid Dutchmen spoke it with accustomed 
ease. There were few signs in the dialect, for it is rather a spoken 
than a written language, though there is one tiny weekly printed in 
Papiamento, and two or three books in it may be had in the shops. 



478 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

The names over the latter are mainly Spanish and Dutch, occasionally 
French or English ; street names are in Dutch. The daily newspaper 
is in Spanish, with some of its notices and advertisements in Dutch or 
English. The official bulletin is of course in the official language, as 
are the placards in government offices. Why a few signs about town 
are also in Papiamento is a mystery, for the educated natives all read 
Dutch, and the others rarely read anything at all. 

There are only ten cities in the West Indies which have tramways, 
and of them all that of Curasao is the most amusing. For it is single 
and alone, a crude little car with an automobile engine, which makes 
the horseshoe-shaped journey around the bay and back every half hour. 
Even in the suburbs the houses are tile-roofed and plaster-faced, gay 
and cleanly without, though with the same newspapered interiors of 
most negro shacks in the West Indies. The streets of the town, fol- 
lowing the contours of the bay, are seldom straight, and the vista down 
any of them gives curiously mixed reminiscences of Holland and at the 
same time of tropical cities. 

We took the unescapable Ford out past the bulking, cream-colored 
Catholic church, with its glaring whitewashed cemetery of cement tombs 
decorated with tin flowers rattling in the breeze and a few withered 
plants, to an ostrich farm in the interior. A hundred or more of the 
mammoth birds, if one count the gray, disheveled chicks, live in pairs 
or groups in bare corrals walled with woven reeds, and furnish their 
Teutonic owner a steady and appreciable income. A dozen American 
windmills clustered together in a little hollow irrigate space enough to 
grow the alfalfa and other green stuff needed for their nourishment. 
Yet even this strange industry looks out of place in so arid a land, and 
as one scurries over the tolerable roads which cover the island, past 
occasional make-shift shanties, jolting mule-carts, and an endless vista 
of bare, parched ground scattered with repulsive forms of thorny vege- 
tation, the wonder comes again that this desert-faced coral reef should 
have succeeded in attracting human inhabitants. 

Of the unimportant islets, keys, and rocks which we did not visit for 
lack of time, transportation, or inclination, we passed by with most 
regret the three Dutch islands of the north, for, this being a strictly 
West Indian journey, we did not pretend to touch that collection of 
countless small and smaller bits of land, all British, known as the Ba- 
hamas. Saba we saw, clear cut against the sunrise, as we steamed 
lazily on into St. Kitts. It is only a mountain-top, towering three thou- 



ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN 479 

sand feet above the Caribbean, and extending who knows how far 
below its surface, for the water is very deep all about this tiny patch of 
five square miles. Cone-shaped, of volcanic formation, it rises abruptly 
from the sea to the clouds, and, one thousand feet up, in what must 
once have been a crater, is the only town, aptly named " The Bottom." 
Here live some fifteen hundred inhabitants; another five hundred are 
scattered about in tiny hamlets called " districts." The people are 
mainly white, descendants of Dutch settlers, though English is the pre- 
vailing language. Some legends have it that the Sabans are really 
English, descended from the Devonshire exiles of the Monmouth Re- 
bellion, but with the mixture that has gone on for many generations it 
is difficult to confirm this tradition. There is no real harbor ; indeed, 
no sign of " The Bottom " and its people can be seen except from the 
eastern side. There the " Ladder " of eight hundred steps leads from 
the difficult landing to the town. Almost every one lives high up on the 
cone, raising Irish potatoes, onions, and other northern vegetables in 
the coolness of the heights. One fantastic tale has it that supplies from 
the outer world and the inhabitants returning with them are hauled up 
the slope in baskets attached to a cable anchored in the town ; the un- 
romantic truth is that the former are carried up on the heads of the 
latter, or on the little horses which are equally skilful in climbing the 
rock-cut " Ladder." Strangely enough, Saba is famed for the boats it 
builds, which are constructed not at the water's edge, but in " The Bot- 
tom." If he is set on remaining in Dutch territory, there could be no 
finer place in which to house the war lord of the twentieth century 
than the island of Saba. 

St. Eustatius, or " 'Statia," as it is familiarly called, is another single 
mountain near St. Kitts, an extinct volcano with its top cut off and rising 
from the sea in magnificent white cliffs. Six other islands and all the 
eight square miles of 'Statia can be seen from its summit. Its anchor- 
age is safe, and a steep path cut in the face of the cliff leads to Oran- 
gested, the capital, its old fort now used as court house, post-office, 
and prison, and the Dutch Reformed church rising above its ancient 
vaults. Once upon a time 'Statia was a rich and coveted prize, and 
many nations strove for possession of the " Golden Rock." Eirst colo- 
nized by the Dutch, it was successively seized by the English, the French, 
then went on round the circle again, finally reverting to Holland. To- 
day its glory is faded and gone, and with its deterioration its allegiance 
has become a bit unsteady. Emigration to the United States is unceas- 



480 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

ing, that to Holland is slight. The proportion of whites is small, though 
the local government is well organized under a governor-general from 
Holland. Several large dilapidated graveyards testify to its one-time 
grandeur and activity, that of the Jews being long unused, if any other 
proof of 'Statia's decline were needed. The limited rains and conse- 
quent lack of water are largely to blame for its rapid depopulation. 
The 'Statians drink rain-water, gathered from the roofs and gutters and 
hoarded in cisterns, their animals the salty stuff from wells. A few 
vegetables, more tropical than those of Saba, are grown : yams, cassava, 
arrow-root, sweet-potatoes, also a bit of sisal and sea-island cotton. 
Once St. Eustatius was a port of call for South American whalers, but 
even that glory is gradually being wrested from it. 

The island of St. Martin is only forty square miles in extent, yet it 
has been a colony of two great European nations since 1648. The 
French and Dutch are reported to have landed simultaneously. Said 
they, " Let 's not fight in such a climate over such a bagatelle ; we '11 
let two men start together and walk around the island, and from here 
to where they meet shall be the boundary." But the Frenchman was 
tall and the Dutchman short, so the latter demanded the right to choose 
the direction. This granted, he set out to the south, where the ground 
was level and fertile. Possibly he stopped now and then for a drink 
with the Indians. At any rate, the Frenchman won two thirds of the 
island. A treaty was signed, and the larger portion of the island long 
flourished under a private company, which eventually gave it to the 
French crown. It was several times taken by the English, who, if 
unable to retain possession, at least left it their language. Finally, at 
the end of the eighteenth century, Victor Hugues again won it for France 
and divided it along a rugged range of hills, giving Holland the south- 
ern third once more, and annexing the French part to the island of 
Guadeloupe. The terms of the original treaty remain in force to this 
day, and the two communities carry on their tiny share of the world's 
affairs and their common salt industry in perfect amity, despite their 
two faiths, two sets of laws, and two official languages. 

Rather because it has long been an habitual pastime than in the hope 
of seeing the quest greatly rewarded, I kept a constant lookout for 
native literature during our journey through the West Indies. Four 
sections in the Biblioteca Nacional of Havana are devoted to Cuban 
writers, totaling perhaps five hundred volumes. With the exception of 




The harbor of Curasao 







* 

■fin 



A woman of Curacao 




The principal Dutch island is not noted for its verdure 




A Curacao landscape 



ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN 481 

about a score of these, however, the collection is made up of ponderous 
tomes of what might be called history were they not filled with long- 
winded political squabbles completely devoid of interest to the general 
reader, and of slender volumes of the lyric poetry which pours forth in 
a constant stream in all Latin-American communities. The latter, un- 
fortunately, with their inevitable verses on the Niagara Falls, the de- 
tails of feminine charms, and the horrors of unrequited love, are much 
more noted for their mellifluous flow of language than for original 
thought or imagery. Of the twenty left, possibly five would hold the 
interest of American readers beyond the first few pages. As " every 
one " writes poetry, no matter what his more useful occupation, there is 
comparatively little work done in imaginative prose. Nor is there any 
great demand for such works ; the majority of Cubans never open a 
book, and those who do are apt to turn to translations of the trashier 
French novels. For, like all Latin-America, the island takes its intel- 
lectual cue from France; the " Collection of American Authors " in the 
Cuban library contains the name of no man born north of the Rio 
Grande. The natives themselves vote " Cecilia Valdes " their best work 
of fiction, though many years have passed since its writing. To-day 
three or four residents of the island are producing occasional volumes 
of the usual Spanish-American type of novel, over-florid in description, 
heavy with details, and intimate beyond the point of decency according 
to our standards, yet with a nicety of style seldom attained by our own 
present-day novelists and now and then catching a true reflection of a 
tropical landscape or a native idiosyncrasy. Nothing that Cuba has 
produced, however, stands out in full world's stature, such as " Maria " 
in Colombia or " Innocencia " in Brazil. 

In Haiti little or nothing of an original nature has been written. We 
found one small volume in the native jargon, its name, '* Cric-Crac," 
quite aptly describing its contents. In Santo Domingo there are liter- 
ary aspirations similar to those of Cuba, and as constant, if less volu- 
minous, a flow of " poetry." But while several so-called novels have 
been, and still are, produced, they are worth reading only because of 
their scattered pages of often unintentional local color. Porto Rico is 
a disappointment in a literary way, as in some others. Though the 
island teems to-day, as it has for centuries, with rich material ready 
for the picking by the writer of fiction, we found nothing unquestion- 
ably indigenous of an imaginative character except a collection of 
" Cuentos Populares " and the inevitable, almost maudlin, verses of 
scattered parentage natural to all Spanish-American communities. 



482 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

A very readable little book called " Phases of Barbadian Life," writ- 
ten, however, by a native of British Guiana, and two pamphlet novels 
on Trinidad, were the total reward of our quest in the smaller English 
islands. One of the latter, " Rupert Gray," by name, is worth perusal 
for the amusing side-lights it throws on the lucubrations of the African 
mind, by which it was conceived and brought into being. There is an 
added interest in reading these books, slight as is their literary merit, 
arising from the suspense in guessing whether the heroine is black, 
" colored," or white, and the uncertainty as to the degree of sympathy 
which should accordingly be shown for her mishaps. In Jamaica a 
man who styles himself a " writer of novels " rather than a novelist has 
produced several modern tales in which the island life, traditions, and 
the character of the masses is portrayed with a facile touch in as read- 
able a style of the King's English as may be found anywhere. Of them 
all perhaps " Susan Proudleigh " and " Jane " are the most nearly 
excellent. 

In a bit of a shop entitled " Au Bon Livre " in Martinique we picked 
up a small novel based on the disaster of St. Pierre, called " Coeurs 
Martiniquais," a simply told, vivid little story. In the French islands 
we found also a book in the native patois entitled " Extraits des Bam- 
bous," but to all outward appearances it was little more than a transla- 
tion or an adaptation from La Fontaine's fables. The French and 
British islands are much less given to perpetrating poetry than those in 
which the Spanish tongue is spoken, and show an equal disinclination 
to producing the heavy volumes on subjects too ponderous for the au- 
thors themselves which burden the dusty book-shelves of Ibero- 
American lands. On the whole, the West Indies «are a virgin field for 
the literary artist who cares to turn his attention to them. 

At various periods during the last hundred years " feelers " have 
been thrown out from one side or the other to sound the attitude to- 
ward the purchase of the British, French, and possibly the Dutch, West 
Indies by the United States. The more than attractive price which we 
squandered for the Virgin Islands, together with the recent suggestions 
of certain European statesmen that this would be an easy way for Eng- 
land and France to wipe out some of their crushing war debts, has re- 
vived the question, and we found it everywhere a topic of conversation in 
the smaller Antilles. That the mother countries themselves would con- 
sent to such a bargain, if the price corresponded to the one we recently 
paid for vastly less valuable possessions, is probable, despite the soothing 



ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN 483 

platitudes of princes and ministers, to the general effect that " a mother 
does not sell her children." What the islands themselves have to say on 
the subject is perhaps more to the point in these modern days of alleged 
" self-determination " ; and they are backward in expressing themselves. 

" In a way we should like to join America," said a white resident of 
one of the first British islands we visited, " but we have not been en- 
tirely pleased with the way America has treated her new West Indian 
colonies. St. Thomas was too harshly handled ; you should have broken 
them in gradually and left a good impression on the rest of us." (All 
West Indians apparently labor under the impression that the United 
States is eager to add them to our population if only the mother coun- 
tries and they themselves will consent.) "Then, too, we would never 
stand for prohibition. The negroes would burn every field of sugar- 
cane on the islands if they were denied their rum. You would have to 
kill them all off. A man, even a woman, must have his liquor in the 
tropics. Three or four cock-tails or whiskies a day take the place of 
the bracing cold of the North. Without it the nerves go bad. We are 
much more in touch with, I might even say we have more sympathy for, 
the United States than for England, but for those two reasons we might 
hesitate to advocate American ownership. Then, many of the blacks 
are against it because they feel that the United States has never treated 
the negro fairly." 

" We are doing no business except in the absolute necessities," added 
another white colonial, a man with a string of twenty-six stores through- 
out the Lesser Antilles. " With so bad an exchange we can't buy in 
the United States ; England has never shipped us the goods we want at 
prices we can pay ; we must wait until Germany gets back into the mar- 
ket. I am almost the only merchant in this island in favor of transfer- 
ring our allegiance to America. The rest have a ridiculous sentimen- 
tality for England or are too conservative to know what is for their 
own good. Our prosperity would increase by leaps and bounds under 
the American flag. Look at the prosperity of Cuba and Porto Rico. 
The preferential tariff has increased their sugar output eight times over. 
Yet British Guiana alone could produce more sugar than Cuba under a 
government that would develop her resources." 

The other side of the case was most vehemently espoused by a mu- 
latto journalist of Guadeloupe. His editorials accused the " material- 
istic Yankees " of " wishing to buy the rest of the world cheap," and 
cited the drop in value of the franc and the pound sterling as proof of 
their nefarious projects; for it is a general impression in the West 



484 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

Indies that the rate of exchange is set by American capitalists quite at 
will. In private conversation he was more courteous, though none the 
less insistent. 

" We are quite ready to admit," he asserted, '! that the United States 
would give us more material advancement in two years than France 
has in two centuries. We are friendly to Americans, grateful to them; 
America was the first to give after the Pelee disaster; we might even 
fight for America ; but we feel a love for France as for a mother. We 
are French and we wish to remain French ; we wish to keep our French 
liberty, which is liberty as we understand it. From our point of view 
the United States is the greatest autocracy in the world ; it has no real 
republican form of government, no real freedom of the people. Take 
your white slave law and the prohibition amendment, for example ; 
they are abhorrent to our idea of liberty. The idea of a great federal 
government chasing a pair of lovers because they happen to cross a 
state-line, or putting a free citizen in jail merely for selling a bottle of 
wine, a perfectly legitimate action in any part of the world since the 
dawn of history! C'est fantastique. The Americans violate our very 
conception of civil liberty. In Panama and Haiti they come into a 
house and break up household utensils, throw disinfectants about. We 
grant that our health might improve under such drastic sanitary meas- 
ures, but the suffering to our pride would far more than offset that 
advantage. And above all," he concluded, " under French rule we 
people of color have what America never has and never will give us, 
equality of opportunity and standing with the whites." 

These two views are typical of a hundred we heard on the subject, 
and form the boundaries of opinion among West Indians. Roughly 
speaking, the French islands and Barbados, possibly Trinidad, are de- 
cidedly against changing their allegiance, and the rest of the British 
West Indies looks rather favorably upon the idea. When a rumor 
came to Martinique soon after the armistice that France was contem- 
plating such a move, frantic cables were sent to Paris, and mobs gath- 
ered before the American consulate. " Have we not fought and died 
for France, not to be thus treacherously abandoned ? " demanded the 
enraged citizens. In Barbados the people froth at the mouth at the 
mere suggestion of losing their British standing. " Little England " 
has always been proud of her loyalty ; when Charles I was beheaded, 
the island was so strongly royalist that it immediately declared alle- 
giance to Charles II. Trinidad is farther away and has a prosperity 
of her own, which may be why the problem is not taken very seriously 



ODDS AND ENDS IN THE CARIBBEAN 485 

there. In the other British colonies it is largely an economic question, 
with no great amount of patriotism or sentiment entering into the 
matter. Scores of Jamaican negroes replied to the query of whether 
they had heard of the proposed change with, " Oh, we all wishin' dat 
hard, sir." Even Englishmen living in Jamaica expressed themselves 
as feeling it would be better for the island, much as they would regret 
it from a sentimental point of view. " The trouble with the English," 
said a Jamaican of standing, " is that if they have a dollar, they put it 
in the bank and sit on it, whereas the American makes it get out and 
work for him. We are backward because England will not spend the 
money to develop our resources. The men who work for the big 
American companies here on the island get three or four times the 
salaries of those employed by British corporations." 

There are exceptions to the rule in both groups of islands. Thus 
the working classes are more apt to favor the proposed change than are 
business men or employers. They feel that the interests of their group 
are more generously considered under the Stars and Stripes. The 
poorer white people of the French Antilles are like-minded for another 
reason ; they chafe under the overwhelming political power of the great 
colored mass of the population. Then there are further ramifications. 
Many working-men who would otherwise be decided advocates of the 
transfer stick at the American conception of the color-line. Strangely 
enough, prohibition is the hardest pill for many to contemplate swal- 
lowing, which perhaps is not so strange, after all, in countries where 
the making of rum is one of the chief industries. 

That there would be certain advantages to the United States in ac- 
quiring possession of, or political control over, all the islands on our 
southeastern seaboard goes without saying. Politicians of " imperial- 
istic " tendencies will in all probability explain them to us in detail from 
time to time as the years roll by. But there is little doubt that they are 
outweighed by the disadvantages, at least all those of a material nature. 
Sentimentally it would be pleasant to see our flag flying over all the 
Caribbean; it would be still more so to feel that no European nation 
has a foothold on the western hemisphere. That day is in all proba- 
bility coming, though it is still perhaps far off. As a merely financial 
proposition, Holland, France, and even England could afford to pay 
tis for taking their possessions in tropical America off their hands. 
But with the Virgin Islands as an example, we would be paying dearly 
long after we had parted with any acceptable price which would bring 
the European West Indies under our flag. Merely to raise them to 



486 ROAMING THROUGH THE WEST INDIES 

the American standard in sanitation would be a colossal task, to say 
nothing of adding materially to our already troublesome " color ques- 
tion." As some joker has put it, " We could well afford to buy all the 
West Indies on the basis of the price paid to Denmark, if the sellers 
would agree to remove all the population " ; any other arrangement 
would probably prove a poor bargain. 



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